I saw Millers Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991) years ago and didn't understand it. The film has recently emerged from the shadows in the context of Judge Brett Kavanaugh's petulant and tearful address to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the afternoon of September 27, 2018. Commenting on the sobbing that punctuated Kavanaugh's speech, Stephen King, the horror-novel writer, quoted the loathsome Bernie Birnbaum, a toxic thug in the Coen brother's movie. The film's hero moved by Bernie's crying is unable to murder him notwithstanding demands by the mobster with which he is (momentarily) affiliated. Later, Birnbaum arrogantly tells Tommy (the protagonist played by Gabriel Byrne): "(If you threaten to kill me) I'll just squirt out a few and, then, you'll let me go again." Such hubris can not go without punishment and, ultimately, Tommy kills only one person in this bloody film: Bernie Birnbaum, shot through the brain exactly as he is pleading for mercy and vigorously expelling tears.
Millers Crossing remains baffling to me. It has an intricately plotted narrative that is mostly an excuse for people to batter, punch, and torture the film's protagonist, Tommy. Clearly an exercise in neo film noir, the movie follows the convention that the hero is generally beaten up pretty thoroughly throughout the film and, even, periodically slugged unconscious. But the Coen brothers execution of this theme is so extravagant that the film assumes the aspect of masochist's reverie -- the hero is a poor schmuck, a schlemihl, whom everyone thrashes. In this regard, the story presages other films by the Coen brothers, particularly A Serious Man, The Man who wasn't There, and Inside Llewellyn Davis, movies that featured main characters who suffer one humiliation after another, the victims of the worst luck possible. (The secret source for this type of narrative is Jewish and revealed in A Serious Man -- the story of Job.) In Miller's Crossing, Tommy is a reasonable man, a criminal who serves as a kind of consiglieri to Leo, an impulsive Irish mob boss played by Albert Finney. Another gangster, Caspar, demands that Leo kill an associate, Bernie Birnbaum (John Turturro). Birnbaum is a reptilian homosexual and "degenerate". But Tommy is involved in an affair with Verna, a femme fatale who is also the "twist" (girlfriend) of his boss, Leo. Bernie is Verna's brother -- Bernie boasts that Verna tried to cure his homosexuality with her "bedroom tricks." For some reason that is unclear -- it's the enigma at the center of the film -- Tommy defends Bernie and won't allow him to be murdered; perhaps, his obstinacy on this point is due to his love for Verna (which he won't admit even to himself) or his rationality: he doesn't believe in violence for its own sake. Perhaps, Tommy even has a sense of justice and doesn't think that Bernie deserves slaughter. When Leo sends a "tail" to follow Verna, the man ends up dead and a little boy who finds the corpse in the alley snatches the man's "rug" or hairpiece. Verna, in fact, has shot the man, but the killing gets blamed on Bernie and is thought to be particularly appalling because the murderer is said to have seized the dead man's wig as a souvenir. This killing leads to an all-out gang war fought with Thompson machine guns and with the cops in the nameless city alternately supporting Leo and, then, his enemy Caspar. (The war is imagined as a fight to the death between Italian and Irish mobs.) The respective speakeasies of each mob are raided by the cops who enthusiastically join in the mayhem acting as murderers for first one side and the other -- the film's portrait of a wholly corrupt city is similar in many respects to Kurosawa's treatment of the same subject in Yojimbo. To save Bernie, Tommy admits to his affair with Verna and, thereby, receives a severe beating from Leo. Tommy has to switch sides and join Caspar's mob for a while. As a test of loyalty, Tommy is supposed to kill Bernie who has been captured by the Italian gangster. Tommy can't bring himself to commit the crime and lets Bernie loose. Bernie is supposed to leave town so that Tommy won't be condemned by Caspar for not implementing the murder. (People are taken into a woods to an intersection of paths called "Miller's Crossing" to be executed.) Bernie shows up in town, however, and blackmails Tommy, demanding money from him to stay out of sight. Tommy, who is a gambling addict, is deeply in debt to man named Lazar and he has no money at all. (Lazar's thugs periodically threaten poor Tommy and administer a vicious beating to him as well.) Ultimately, Tommy lures Bernie to an apartment where Caspar is also present. Bernie kills Caspar and, then, Tommy murders Bernie. Tommy has suffered innumerable beatings and torture because of Bernie, a man he was trying to protect and whom he ultimately kills himself. Verna goes back to Leo and, in fact, asks the Irish mobster to marry her. Tommy has lost everything, although he is able to pay back Lazar with greenbacks found on Caspar's corpse. In the last scene, he sits alone in his shabby and dark apartment, placing yet another bet on a horse. The film's morose conclusion is that everything Tommy has done is a failure: he doesn't protect Bernie and, in fact, finds out that Bernie isn't worth saving anyway. Bernie is an out-and-out vicious killer and he has to be put-down like a mad dog. Verna betrays Tommy and goes back to her well-heeled mobster boyfriend. Tommy gets nothing but beatings administered about every ten minutes throughout the film.
The picture is exquisitely designed and shot. (Barry Sonnenfeld is the D. P.) The Coens' edit the film on the violence: many shots begin with someone getting punched in the face or gut. Some of the big set-pieces built to spectacular mayhem and, then, just as our blood-thirst is aroused and we want to see more slaughter, abruptly cut away. A machine gun battle scored to "Danny Boy" is a highlight and the film has an absolutely beautiful theme -- it sounds like an Irish folk song -- played in lush orchestration, particularly when Verna enters the picture. The music is so lovely and overwhelming that it somehow undercuts the squalor of the proceedings. (It functions the way Morricone's themes work in Italian westerns and gangster movies). There is some horrific violence, but it doesn't overwhelm the film and everyone talks in a rat-a-tat delivery that simulates the characters cracking wise in a thirties' screwball comedy. The diction is spectacular and poetic and, often, very funny. At one point, when Verna meretriciously declares her affection for Tommy ("she's a grafter" everyone warns him), the hero replies: "If I had thought that we were casting our feelings into words, I would have memorized 'The Song of Solomon'." Tommy is a thinker, a reasonable man, and, in the corrupt world depicted in the film, he shows what passes for virtue. The film's dispiriting, if realistic, theme is that virtue is never rewarded except by betrayal and beatings. It's an alarming concept masterfully developed, but, ultimately, the film feels just slightly futile and schematic -- it's a little airless. I'm aware, however, that this movie's reputation has grown with the years and it's undoubtedly a cynical masterpiece more akin to the stoic, existentialist crime pictures of Jean-Pierre Melville than to anything produced in Hollywood.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
My Winnipeg
Before I drove up to Winnipeg last week, I recall seeing Guy Maddin's eccentric film essay, My Winnipeg (2007) about his home town some years ago. I didn't remember much about the film and it didn't make an impression on me. I'm a great admirer of Maddin's films, but this picture was too idiosyncratic and solipsistic -- I don't think I understood the movie. But, now, that I have been to Winnipeg and seen many of the sights depicted in the film, I like it better and hold the film in higher regard. Maddin's sensibility is distinctly Canadian -- rueful, abashed, self-effacing, and too stoic to take any misfortune or hardship too seriously. For much of the world, the notion of being born and, then, living in Winnipeg, the place that Maddin calls "the world's coldest city," dubbed "a frozen hellhole" by other Canadians, would be misfortune enough. But, somehow, Maddin manages to make Winnipeg, an ugly, stolid, unassuming place, into one of Calvino's Invisible Cities, a place of strange and sinister enchantment.
Maddin's documentary, really an elaborate filmed essay, is a wild fantasia. This kind of picture can readily decline into undisciplined self-indulgence. Maddin uses sequences showing his surrogate riding on a phantom train through Winnipeg while tossing and turning in uneasy sleep as punctuation and connective tissue. "Winnipeg," Maddin claims, "has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city." At the outset, he announces that the project of the film is make a movie that frees him from Winnipeg, that authorizes him to leave the city of his birth. To leave Winnipeg would be to become fully awake. But Maddin's film is mélange of delirium and nightmare -- instead of awakening the sleeper tormented on the moving train, Maddin's strategy is to plunge the character inexorably deeper into dreams and visions. This strategy is epitomized by a Kafkaesque parable announced early in the film -- I'll relate that story below. It suffices to say that the filmmaker, someone who has carved "dyslexically" his name as "YUG" ("Guy") has come to Winnipeg to undertake certain "experiments" in the house where he grew up. This home he describes as a "block", a square structure located at 800 W. Ellice in Winnipeg -- I saw his house when I was there and it is unchanged from what is shown in the movie. In this house, part of which was occupied by his mother's hair salon, Maddin was raised with three siblings, two brothers and a sister who is a Pan-Canada track star. Maddin's father was the manager of the Winnipeg hockey team, the Jets, I think. Maddin casts a faded blonde movie star, Ann Savage (she was the femme fatale in Edgar Ulmer's 1945 Detour) as his mother and, then, attempts to recreate certain key moments in his childhood, presumably to better appreciate as an adult what happened when he was a child. The incidents don't seem too consequential -- in one the family members try to adjust a perennially disarranged carpet runner; in other sequence, his mother interrogates Maddin's sister viciously implying that her account of hitting a deer on the highway to Kenora is a euphemism for sexual intercourse; in one scene, the children demand that their mother cook them some meatloaf (she has retired to her bed and says that she has forgotten all her recipes and will never cook again). We see the family gathered every noon to watch a TV show called "Ledge Man" -- in the show, a young man threatens to hurl himself to his death from the ledge of a building downtown; in each episode, his mother talks him out of suicide. (At the end of the film, we see the family sitting lying somnolently on couches watching TV and Maddin informs us that his brother, Curtis, killed himself when he was 16, information that casts a powerful light on the fantasy of the family watching "Ledge Man" every day.) These episodes involving autobiography are tied to larger currents in the city's history most of which are defined by absence and loss. Places that were important to Maddin when he was small are now gone, eradicated by the march of progress. He claims to have been born in the old hockey rink where his father worked -- and we see the building demolished after Maddin uses the trough urinal in the rink one last time. Eaton's, Winnipeg's most beloved department store, is also destroyed and replaced with a new hockey rink and event center. An old public baths said to have three separate pools each superimposed above the other is mostly closed -- the two most subterranean baths are now shuttered. An amusement park called Happy Land is dismantled and becomes a shanty-town occupied by First Nations squatters on the roofs of the downtown buildings. On the top floor of the Hudson Bay Company department store, a tavern called the Paddlewheel Lounge suffers from a lack of patrons and is threatened to be closed -- this is after we have seen the Lounge used for a decadent spectacle called "The Golden Boy" male beauty pageant. ("The Golden Boy" is the gilded figure atop Manitoba's unicameral legislature building -- a place that Maddin also characterizes as the "largest Masonic Lodge" in the world, an almost true statement, since the building was designed by high-degree freemasons and secretly incorporates much of their hermetic lore into the structure. When I was in Winnipeg, I saw a tour guide illumining the arcana in the legislature building and it was, in fact, mind-boggling.) Maddin likes secret maps imposed on existing public places -- he claims that the Cree believed that there were subterranean rivers flowing under the Forks where the Assiniboine and the Red River combine, thus creating a place of distinctive "magnetism". He imagines a grid of alleys that represent the real thoroughfares in Winnipeg concealed in the interstices of the actual roads. A séance in the capitol building, under the enormous bronze bison flanking the steps to the rotunda, results in sleepwalker's ballet using members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company -- vast amounts of ectoplasm are extruded and it becomes confused in the film's imagery with the never-ending snow fall, the dark streets like tunnels between ramparts of snow, the alleys between houses buried in the stuff, snowflakes always falling over the occult and unreal city.
Maddin uses a variety of styles to present this material. There are delirious point-of-view shots simulating toboggan runs and staggering through the gloomy streets. A lot of newsreel footage is intercut into the film, some of its exceedingly peculiar -- for instance, women chaining themselves to a tree to protect it from the axes of city utility workers. (When the women were persuaded to leave someone blew up the tree with dynamite.) Some of the footage is in color and contemporary -- but other parts of the film are shot on the distressed, murky film-stock that is Maddin's trademark, imagery from a badly damaged, but transcendentally gorgeous silent film known only to the director. At the film's conclusion, Maddin still can't quite awake from his slumbers. Shadows of sleepwalkers stumble through the frozen city. He imagines a "Citizen Girl" who will defend Winnipeg and restore the sites and buildings that it has lost and this is some comfort to him. The movie ends with actors simulating Maddin's parents and his brothers and sisters half asleep in the living room watching TV. An old lady sits with them -- she's sublet the building (it's now a drycleaners and tailor's business) and isn't willing to leave. Maddin recalls his dead brother and acknowledges that the city's magnetism and strange appeal are too great for him and that he is unable to leave. At the beginning of the film, Maddin tells this story: each year, the Winnipeg Free Press sponsored a treasure hunt, hiding a medallion somewhere in the city. The winner of the treasure hunt, the first person to find the medallion, is to be given an all expense paid train ticket to leave Winnipeg. But to find the medallion, one must walk all of Winnipeg's streets and pay close attention to everything in the city and, so, when the person finds the medallion, he or she is so invested in Winnipeg, knows it so well and is so fascinated by the place, that the person can not leave. "In the entire history of the treasure hunt," Maddin says, "not one of the winners ever actually left Winnipeg."
Maddin's esthetic combines curious, disjunctive elements. He uses damaged, scratched and scarred film stock to project images that are spectacularly lit and featuring faces that have the transcendent beauty of silent movie stars. Although he is avowedly heterosexual (the film features his girlfiend's dog, Spanky), Maddin's films are rife with smirking homo-erotic imagery -- in My Winnipeg, the male beauty pageant and a scene involving little boys showing each other their "boners." His documentary about Winnipeg is almost entirely an account of places and people that no longer exist. In the midst of whimsy, he often inserts shocking violence or hideous imagery of wounds and death -- in My Winnipeg, horses are frozen in the river, their heads rearing up out of the ice. (It's a reprise of a famous passage in Curzio Malaparte's memoir about the Russian front, Kaputt). The dead horses, extruded from the ice become a popular trysting place and people have sex on the frozen corpses resulting "in a baby boom, the following November."
Maddin's documentary, really an elaborate filmed essay, is a wild fantasia. This kind of picture can readily decline into undisciplined self-indulgence. Maddin uses sequences showing his surrogate riding on a phantom train through Winnipeg while tossing and turning in uneasy sleep as punctuation and connective tissue. "Winnipeg," Maddin claims, "has ten times more sleepwalkers than any other city." At the outset, he announces that the project of the film is make a movie that frees him from Winnipeg, that authorizes him to leave the city of his birth. To leave Winnipeg would be to become fully awake. But Maddin's film is mélange of delirium and nightmare -- instead of awakening the sleeper tormented on the moving train, Maddin's strategy is to plunge the character inexorably deeper into dreams and visions. This strategy is epitomized by a Kafkaesque parable announced early in the film -- I'll relate that story below. It suffices to say that the filmmaker, someone who has carved "dyslexically" his name as "YUG" ("Guy") has come to Winnipeg to undertake certain "experiments" in the house where he grew up. This home he describes as a "block", a square structure located at 800 W. Ellice in Winnipeg -- I saw his house when I was there and it is unchanged from what is shown in the movie. In this house, part of which was occupied by his mother's hair salon, Maddin was raised with three siblings, two brothers and a sister who is a Pan-Canada track star. Maddin's father was the manager of the Winnipeg hockey team, the Jets, I think. Maddin casts a faded blonde movie star, Ann Savage (she was the femme fatale in Edgar Ulmer's 1945 Detour) as his mother and, then, attempts to recreate certain key moments in his childhood, presumably to better appreciate as an adult what happened when he was a child. The incidents don't seem too consequential -- in one the family members try to adjust a perennially disarranged carpet runner; in other sequence, his mother interrogates Maddin's sister viciously implying that her account of hitting a deer on the highway to Kenora is a euphemism for sexual intercourse; in one scene, the children demand that their mother cook them some meatloaf (she has retired to her bed and says that she has forgotten all her recipes and will never cook again). We see the family gathered every noon to watch a TV show called "Ledge Man" -- in the show, a young man threatens to hurl himself to his death from the ledge of a building downtown; in each episode, his mother talks him out of suicide. (At the end of the film, we see the family sitting lying somnolently on couches watching TV and Maddin informs us that his brother, Curtis, killed himself when he was 16, information that casts a powerful light on the fantasy of the family watching "Ledge Man" every day.) These episodes involving autobiography are tied to larger currents in the city's history most of which are defined by absence and loss. Places that were important to Maddin when he was small are now gone, eradicated by the march of progress. He claims to have been born in the old hockey rink where his father worked -- and we see the building demolished after Maddin uses the trough urinal in the rink one last time. Eaton's, Winnipeg's most beloved department store, is also destroyed and replaced with a new hockey rink and event center. An old public baths said to have three separate pools each superimposed above the other is mostly closed -- the two most subterranean baths are now shuttered. An amusement park called Happy Land is dismantled and becomes a shanty-town occupied by First Nations squatters on the roofs of the downtown buildings. On the top floor of the Hudson Bay Company department store, a tavern called the Paddlewheel Lounge suffers from a lack of patrons and is threatened to be closed -- this is after we have seen the Lounge used for a decadent spectacle called "The Golden Boy" male beauty pageant. ("The Golden Boy" is the gilded figure atop Manitoba's unicameral legislature building -- a place that Maddin also characterizes as the "largest Masonic Lodge" in the world, an almost true statement, since the building was designed by high-degree freemasons and secretly incorporates much of their hermetic lore into the structure. When I was in Winnipeg, I saw a tour guide illumining the arcana in the legislature building and it was, in fact, mind-boggling.) Maddin likes secret maps imposed on existing public places -- he claims that the Cree believed that there were subterranean rivers flowing under the Forks where the Assiniboine and the Red River combine, thus creating a place of distinctive "magnetism". He imagines a grid of alleys that represent the real thoroughfares in Winnipeg concealed in the interstices of the actual roads. A séance in the capitol building, under the enormous bronze bison flanking the steps to the rotunda, results in sleepwalker's ballet using members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet company -- vast amounts of ectoplasm are extruded and it becomes confused in the film's imagery with the never-ending snow fall, the dark streets like tunnels between ramparts of snow, the alleys between houses buried in the stuff, snowflakes always falling over the occult and unreal city.
Maddin uses a variety of styles to present this material. There are delirious point-of-view shots simulating toboggan runs and staggering through the gloomy streets. A lot of newsreel footage is intercut into the film, some of its exceedingly peculiar -- for instance, women chaining themselves to a tree to protect it from the axes of city utility workers. (When the women were persuaded to leave someone blew up the tree with dynamite.) Some of the footage is in color and contemporary -- but other parts of the film are shot on the distressed, murky film-stock that is Maddin's trademark, imagery from a badly damaged, but transcendentally gorgeous silent film known only to the director. At the film's conclusion, Maddin still can't quite awake from his slumbers. Shadows of sleepwalkers stumble through the frozen city. He imagines a "Citizen Girl" who will defend Winnipeg and restore the sites and buildings that it has lost and this is some comfort to him. The movie ends with actors simulating Maddin's parents and his brothers and sisters half asleep in the living room watching TV. An old lady sits with them -- she's sublet the building (it's now a drycleaners and tailor's business) and isn't willing to leave. Maddin recalls his dead brother and acknowledges that the city's magnetism and strange appeal are too great for him and that he is unable to leave. At the beginning of the film, Maddin tells this story: each year, the Winnipeg Free Press sponsored a treasure hunt, hiding a medallion somewhere in the city. The winner of the treasure hunt, the first person to find the medallion, is to be given an all expense paid train ticket to leave Winnipeg. But to find the medallion, one must walk all of Winnipeg's streets and pay close attention to everything in the city and, so, when the person finds the medallion, he or she is so invested in Winnipeg, knows it so well and is so fascinated by the place, that the person can not leave. "In the entire history of the treasure hunt," Maddin says, "not one of the winners ever actually left Winnipeg."
Maddin's esthetic combines curious, disjunctive elements. He uses damaged, scratched and scarred film stock to project images that are spectacularly lit and featuring faces that have the transcendent beauty of silent movie stars. Although he is avowedly heterosexual (the film features his girlfiend's dog, Spanky), Maddin's films are rife with smirking homo-erotic imagery -- in My Winnipeg, the male beauty pageant and a scene involving little boys showing each other their "boners." His documentary about Winnipeg is almost entirely an account of places and people that no longer exist. In the midst of whimsy, he often inserts shocking violence or hideous imagery of wounds and death -- in My Winnipeg, horses are frozen in the river, their heads rearing up out of the ice. (It's a reprise of a famous passage in Curzio Malaparte's memoir about the Russian front, Kaputt). The dead horses, extruded from the ice become a popular trysting place and people have sex on the frozen corpses resulting "in a baby boom, the following November."
Sunday, September 23, 2018
The Witch
Robert Eggers 2015 horror film, The Witch, baffled general audiences and was, more or less, derided by the people who are fans of the genre. In fact, the picture is excellent, although fundamentally pointless except as an exercise in ethnography. Nonetheless, I thought the film was scary in a grim, relentless way and contains images that can't be unseen. The picture is too subtle to appeal to fans of gore and slowly paced with most of the horror just off-screen. The audience to which this film would appeal is not likely to see it and, so, the entire venture seems a little quixotic.
An antinomian Puritan named Will, with his family, is banished from the tiny New England hamlet where they live. Will takes his family into the wilderness where they clear land and build a farm. Something supernatural lives in the autumnal woods. Thomasina, the family's teenage daughter, ventures into the forest with a small baby. The baby vanishes --it's thought a wolf stole the child. Thomasina has strange visions -- she imagines a shapeless crone grinding the baby in wooden churn and, then, applying the pulverized flesh and fat to her naked body. The family is riven by conflict: Will has taken his wife's silver chalice and pawned it, although Thomasina is blamed for the missing cup. Thomasina's brother, Caleb, lecherously eyes the young girl's swelling bosom. While hunting with his father in the woods, he encounters a strange black rabbit. The rabbit bears bad luck. When Will tries to shoot the animal, his fuse-lit musket explodes and half-blinds him. The corn in their fields is blighted. Caleb goes into the forest alone and encounters an alluring female apparition. He appears a day later, naked and feverish, and, after being bled, dies. Thomasina's little brother and sister, the twins, Jonas and Mercy, claim that the goat, Black Philip, has been talking to them. Terror seizes the family and Will uses an axe and nails to confine his the three surviving children in a shed. The witch comes and sucks blood from a white goat and, then, Black Philip gores Will, causing a huge stack of firewood that he has been obsessively chopping to collapse on him so that he also dies. After seeing the twins dead, Thomasina's mother, Katherine, goes mad and tries to strangle the teenage girl. Thomasina kills her and, then, speaks with Black Philip who, now, encourages her to "live deliciously". With the goat and stripped naked, she enters the forest and encounters a coven of naked witches -- they levitate around a bonfire and, in the film's final shot, we see Thomasina hovering at the summit of great, grey and barren tree lit by the leaping flames below. A final title reminds us that the film is based upon diaries, books, and engravings made during the early part of the 17th century.
The film is shot in long takes that emphasize the family's nightmarish isolation. In effect, the movie is silent, a bit like Sjostrom's terrifying Hollywood picture starring Lillian Gish, The Wind (1927). Nature is portrayed as demonic and the black rabbit and goat are familiars of the devil. The woods are ghastly with dark upturned trees and endless grey corridors of leafless ash and oak. Several shots, including one in which the father and mother dig a narrow pit in which to bury Caleb are spectacularly beautiful, misty with autumn and the little column of smoke rising from the small windowless cabin. Certain aspects of the film suggest that what happens to the family is a result of their dour, cheerless, Calvinist faith -- and the terrifying witches may be construed, at least in part, as Thomasina's hallucinations. But too many people encounter the witches and there are seemingly objective sequences involving direct supernatural intervention that can't be interpreted as delirium -- for instance, the scene in which Caleb encounters a voluptuous young witch in the woods. The sequence involving Caleb's death is extremely disturbing but, perhaps, could be interpreted as evidence of religious hysteria triggering hallucinations. But, ultimately, the film implies that the witches are real, perniciously malign, and, even, deadly. Thus, the film is not really a study in the psychological need to believe in evil forces. Rather, it seems an ethnography of New England witchcraft, something that is suggested by the movie's subtitle, "A New England Folktale". Before he dies Caleb experiences the caresses of Jesus as a lover and voluptuously rubs his arms over his pale torso proclaiming that he is in God's embrace. Then, his eyes roll up in his head and he dies. The twins are crumpled near the bed suffering seizures. Religious faith itself is shown to be unnatural, grotesque, and terrible. Everyone hallucinates. We see a shocking image of Caleb's mother, emaciated with the taut face of a starving animal, huddled in the little boy's narrow grave, clutching at the corpse. Later, she sees the boy and her lost baby sitting together in a corner of the cabin. She opens her blouse to suckle the baby and, then, the screen goes black -- in the next shot, the woman's breast is being ravaged by raven, flesh pecked away and blood on her white shift. The scenes of the great horned goat, black as midnight, goring Will are terrifying as is the sequence in the woods in which the voluptuous young witch leans forward to kiss Caleb while suddenly her hand extrudes from the edge of screen, lurching to seize the boy and shot in close-up so that we can see that the limb is ancient and horribly gnarled. Will's madness is expressed in obsessive hacking of wood into kindling. The great heap of wood that he has laid-away for the upcoming window collapse onto him like a dark avalanche so that only his gaunt head protrudes from the pile. Adding to the film's eerie ambience is the fact that I couldn't understand the actor's accents -- everyone speaks with a strong, impenetrable Yorkshire accent and Will, in particular, has a basso profundo voice that registers subliminally as a low earthquake rumbling; I understood less than one-fifth of what he said, although I don't think the dialogue, written in pidgin Jacobean English has any significance. I wonder about the point of the movie -- it seems an exceedingly accurate account of the way people acted and thought and their fears three-hundred years ago. But to what end? The interiors are all naturally lit with candles and the exterior woods are wild and vacant except for evil presences -- the movie was shot near Kiosk, Ontario -- and the actors all have pale, tightly pinched faces and wear strange shapeless garments. It looks like a deranged documentary -- in fact, much of the budget was expended on producing the home-spun clothing. I have the same reaction to Ingmar Bergman's sublime, but ultimately futile, The Virgin Spring. What, may I ask, is the point? Witches don't exist and so why do we need to know so much about them.
An antinomian Puritan named Will, with his family, is banished from the tiny New England hamlet where they live. Will takes his family into the wilderness where they clear land and build a farm. Something supernatural lives in the autumnal woods. Thomasina, the family's teenage daughter, ventures into the forest with a small baby. The baby vanishes --it's thought a wolf stole the child. Thomasina has strange visions -- she imagines a shapeless crone grinding the baby in wooden churn and, then, applying the pulverized flesh and fat to her naked body. The family is riven by conflict: Will has taken his wife's silver chalice and pawned it, although Thomasina is blamed for the missing cup. Thomasina's brother, Caleb, lecherously eyes the young girl's swelling bosom. While hunting with his father in the woods, he encounters a strange black rabbit. The rabbit bears bad luck. When Will tries to shoot the animal, his fuse-lit musket explodes and half-blinds him. The corn in their fields is blighted. Caleb goes into the forest alone and encounters an alluring female apparition. He appears a day later, naked and feverish, and, after being bled, dies. Thomasina's little brother and sister, the twins, Jonas and Mercy, claim that the goat, Black Philip, has been talking to them. Terror seizes the family and Will uses an axe and nails to confine his the three surviving children in a shed. The witch comes and sucks blood from a white goat and, then, Black Philip gores Will, causing a huge stack of firewood that he has been obsessively chopping to collapse on him so that he also dies. After seeing the twins dead, Thomasina's mother, Katherine, goes mad and tries to strangle the teenage girl. Thomasina kills her and, then, speaks with Black Philip who, now, encourages her to "live deliciously". With the goat and stripped naked, she enters the forest and encounters a coven of naked witches -- they levitate around a bonfire and, in the film's final shot, we see Thomasina hovering at the summit of great, grey and barren tree lit by the leaping flames below. A final title reminds us that the film is based upon diaries, books, and engravings made during the early part of the 17th century.
The film is shot in long takes that emphasize the family's nightmarish isolation. In effect, the movie is silent, a bit like Sjostrom's terrifying Hollywood picture starring Lillian Gish, The Wind (1927). Nature is portrayed as demonic and the black rabbit and goat are familiars of the devil. The woods are ghastly with dark upturned trees and endless grey corridors of leafless ash and oak. Several shots, including one in which the father and mother dig a narrow pit in which to bury Caleb are spectacularly beautiful, misty with autumn and the little column of smoke rising from the small windowless cabin. Certain aspects of the film suggest that what happens to the family is a result of their dour, cheerless, Calvinist faith -- and the terrifying witches may be construed, at least in part, as Thomasina's hallucinations. But too many people encounter the witches and there are seemingly objective sequences involving direct supernatural intervention that can't be interpreted as delirium -- for instance, the scene in which Caleb encounters a voluptuous young witch in the woods. The sequence involving Caleb's death is extremely disturbing but, perhaps, could be interpreted as evidence of religious hysteria triggering hallucinations. But, ultimately, the film implies that the witches are real, perniciously malign, and, even, deadly. Thus, the film is not really a study in the psychological need to believe in evil forces. Rather, it seems an ethnography of New England witchcraft, something that is suggested by the movie's subtitle, "A New England Folktale". Before he dies Caleb experiences the caresses of Jesus as a lover and voluptuously rubs his arms over his pale torso proclaiming that he is in God's embrace. Then, his eyes roll up in his head and he dies. The twins are crumpled near the bed suffering seizures. Religious faith itself is shown to be unnatural, grotesque, and terrible. Everyone hallucinates. We see a shocking image of Caleb's mother, emaciated with the taut face of a starving animal, huddled in the little boy's narrow grave, clutching at the corpse. Later, she sees the boy and her lost baby sitting together in a corner of the cabin. She opens her blouse to suckle the baby and, then, the screen goes black -- in the next shot, the woman's breast is being ravaged by raven, flesh pecked away and blood on her white shift. The scenes of the great horned goat, black as midnight, goring Will are terrifying as is the sequence in the woods in which the voluptuous young witch leans forward to kiss Caleb while suddenly her hand extrudes from the edge of screen, lurching to seize the boy and shot in close-up so that we can see that the limb is ancient and horribly gnarled. Will's madness is expressed in obsessive hacking of wood into kindling. The great heap of wood that he has laid-away for the upcoming window collapse onto him like a dark avalanche so that only his gaunt head protrudes from the pile. Adding to the film's eerie ambience is the fact that I couldn't understand the actor's accents -- everyone speaks with a strong, impenetrable Yorkshire accent and Will, in particular, has a basso profundo voice that registers subliminally as a low earthquake rumbling; I understood less than one-fifth of what he said, although I don't think the dialogue, written in pidgin Jacobean English has any significance. I wonder about the point of the movie -- it seems an exceedingly accurate account of the way people acted and thought and their fears three-hundred years ago. But to what end? The interiors are all naturally lit with candles and the exterior woods are wild and vacant except for evil presences -- the movie was shot near Kiosk, Ontario -- and the actors all have pale, tightly pinched faces and wear strange shapeless garments. It looks like a deranged documentary -- in fact, much of the budget was expended on producing the home-spun clothing. I have the same reaction to Ingmar Bergman's sublime, but ultimately futile, The Virgin Spring. What, may I ask, is the point? Witches don't exist and so why do we need to know so much about them.
Saturday, September 22, 2018
Ozark (Series Two)
Shot in nacreous bruise-green twilight, the Netflix crime series Ozark looks nasty. The show leaves the viewer with the impression that it is fantastically violent. In fact, this impression is misleading -- compared to an abattoir like Westworld, there is almost no violence at all: in the nine hours of the show's second series (2018) that I have watched, four murders have been shown on-screen -- that is, about one killing every two hours. So what is the source of the program's constant and menacing aura of hyperbolic violence? I think this impression stems from several characteristics: first, everyone curses all the time and exchange the most lurid and ghastly threats; second, there are usually a couple of beat-downs per episode -- although these sequences are staged in a matter-of-fact way and, often, so short as to seem, more or less, ephemeral. But the green shadows and the portentous rumbling of the soundtrack and the eerie horror-film tracking and gliding camera motions create an omnipresent atmosphere of threat -- if the camera tracks a car or slides sideways smoothly to follow a character, we always expect something awful to occur. Since, Ozark is a family melodrama involving the fortunes of a husband, wife, and their two children, we also fear that the children will be harmed -- in Ozark (second series), there's even a cheerful-looking baby on-screen for half of the episodes (the hero and heroine have killed his daddy) to ramp up the suspense.
The film's premise is pretty much exhausted and, although the show remains absolutely gripping, it's hard for me to imagine that there's much of this grim terrain remaining to be explored. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a genius accountant and money-manager whose work for a Mexican cartel went horribly wrong. He's been forced into laundering immense amounts of money for the drug-runners. In this enterprise, he's joined by his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and his two children, a pale, precocious son, and the family's rebellious teenage daughter. It's always one thing after the other for poor Marty. Either he's being gruesomely threatened by the drug cartel and its sinister lawyer, a tall skinny woman with a blonde Valkyrie hair-do or he's arguing with his wife about her past infidelity (she's cuckolded him with a business partner offed by the Mexicans), or attempting to reassure his two increasingly restive and cynical children that all will well when it's increasingly apparent that nothing will be well at all: his son is money-laundering himself and his daughter has hired a lawyer so that she can be "emancipated" from the family and its nightmarish business. When Mexican gangsters aren't trying to assassinate him, Marty and Wendy are relentlessly persecuted by local villains, including the horrific Snell's, a hillbilly couple that about the most terrifying thing on TV. Sometimes, corrupt local politicians try to shake them down. Everyone constantly blackmails and extorts everyone else. And, further, Marty and Wendy's proposal to build a casino on the Snell's land at the Lake of the Ozarks have run afoul of the Kansas city mob -- killers from that gang are also hovering around the edges of the action. The Snell's, Jacob and Darlene, are like Tom Bodett (of Motel 6 fame) or Roy Blount, Jr. crossed with Hannibal Lecter -- Darlene in particular is so ruthless and relentlessly menacing that she terrifies her poor husband, Jacob (and Jacob is a very scary good ole boy himself -- he and his wife are the local heroin kingpins.) Marty and Wendy are also in business with the Langmore's, another criminal clan, only marginally less intimidating than the lethal Snell family. The best thing in the show is Ruth, the petite blonde teenage girl who serves as the criminal mastermind for the Langmore family -- she's played by Julia Garne, taking a leaf from the role played by Jenifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and, I think, she's one of the most compelling actresses on TV. Indeed, everyone in the show is excellent -- the menagerie of crooked cops and politicians are all indelibly nasty and there's a putrid gay FBI agent, a little like the fanatic zealot played by Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire. The show is a swim in a sewer and everyone is, more or less, corrupt and vicious. Jason Bateman's exceptionally involute and claustrophobically controlled performance is also key to the show's staying power -- Marty Byrde scarcely reacts to any of the horrific trouble in which he always finds himself. His cell-phone plays crickets when he gets a call, usually someone summoning him to a meeting in some miserable dive or remote country lane where he can be threatened, pushed around, and forced to participate, if reluctantly, in the torture of one or the other of his associates. When told by the Mexican cartel's lawyer that the gangster are planning to kidnap and torture his children to death, Marty gulps hard so that his throat bulges a little and his eyes seem to protrude only slightly -- a tiny vein in his temple dilates for a second, but otherwise he maintains his steely composure. A little of this goes a long way and Marty has to gulp down his terror about every half-hour in the film and, although the effect is always impressive, I don't think his muted, strangulated performance is really sustainable in the long run. On the other hand, if he were more demonstrative, I think the show might by unwatchably hysterical.
From beginning to end, the show is a guilty pleasure. The nature of this pleasure isn't pretty and it's not pleasant to describe: someone is bullying someone else, but, then, a bigger and more horribly effective bully knocks the wind out of the first bad guy. The entire show consists of ever more awful villains each strutting for their short period on screen and, then, being cowed and humiliated by even more vicious bad guys. In the opening episode, a rude teenage kid at a car-park won't even look up at the skinny lady lawyer who is trying to question him. We immediately sympathize with lady lawyer. The kid uses an expletive and tells her to get off the property. This kind of stupid and rude behavior deserves come-uppance and we get that in spades -- a Mexican gunman blows off the rude kid's hand and, as he pleads for mercy, pumps about eight shots into his face. It's satisfying in an awful kind of way because we know the logic of the show is, ultimately, to expose the cruel and importunate arrogance of the lady lawyer to some even more awful retribution -- although what this will be we don't know. In one scene, the bad guys are coming to kill a member of the Snell family who has crossed the Mexican mob. When the bad guys close in, the patriarch Jacob Snell takes things into his own hand by bludgeoning his own son to death -- the code demands a sacrifice and to save Darlene, who has a propensity for committing sudden, enraged murders, Jacob has to kill the boy. Darlene won't forgive him and, in fact, murders Jacob in episode nine (or nineteen, depending how you count). But before the murder, there is a flash-back and we see the first time that Jacob Snell laid eyes on his destiny -- he was Vietnam vet come back to the Ozarks and the young and beautiful Darlene seduces him, yanking him out of a small-town café to a cold-looking dark lake where they go skinny-dipping. To establish the year that this occurs, the soundtrack plays Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman". At the end of the episode when Darlene hugs the dying Jacob in a sort of awful, white-trash Liebestod, the camera swoons upward. Jacob's fading vision gives us a POV that shows Darlene as she looked when she first seduced him forty years earlier and, as the camera cranes upward, we hear "Wichita Lineman" again. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in this show -- people stalk around punching each other out while their pockets are literally lined with greenbacks. Millions of dollars are stashed in caskets and walls. So bad guys get their comeuppance, bullies are bullied, and, everyone is flush with cash.
The film's premise is pretty much exhausted and, although the show remains absolutely gripping, it's hard for me to imagine that there's much of this grim terrain remaining to be explored. Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is a genius accountant and money-manager whose work for a Mexican cartel went horribly wrong. He's been forced into laundering immense amounts of money for the drug-runners. In this enterprise, he's joined by his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and his two children, a pale, precocious son, and the family's rebellious teenage daughter. It's always one thing after the other for poor Marty. Either he's being gruesomely threatened by the drug cartel and its sinister lawyer, a tall skinny woman with a blonde Valkyrie hair-do or he's arguing with his wife about her past infidelity (she's cuckolded him with a business partner offed by the Mexicans), or attempting to reassure his two increasingly restive and cynical children that all will well when it's increasingly apparent that nothing will be well at all: his son is money-laundering himself and his daughter has hired a lawyer so that she can be "emancipated" from the family and its nightmarish business. When Mexican gangsters aren't trying to assassinate him, Marty and Wendy are relentlessly persecuted by local villains, including the horrific Snell's, a hillbilly couple that about the most terrifying thing on TV. Sometimes, corrupt local politicians try to shake them down. Everyone constantly blackmails and extorts everyone else. And, further, Marty and Wendy's proposal to build a casino on the Snell's land at the Lake of the Ozarks have run afoul of the Kansas city mob -- killers from that gang are also hovering around the edges of the action. The Snell's, Jacob and Darlene, are like Tom Bodett (of Motel 6 fame) or Roy Blount, Jr. crossed with Hannibal Lecter -- Darlene in particular is so ruthless and relentlessly menacing that she terrifies her poor husband, Jacob (and Jacob is a very scary good ole boy himself -- he and his wife are the local heroin kingpins.) Marty and Wendy are also in business with the Langmore's, another criminal clan, only marginally less intimidating than the lethal Snell family. The best thing in the show is Ruth, the petite blonde teenage girl who serves as the criminal mastermind for the Langmore family -- she's played by Julia Garne, taking a leaf from the role played by Jenifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and, I think, she's one of the most compelling actresses on TV. Indeed, everyone in the show is excellent -- the menagerie of crooked cops and politicians are all indelibly nasty and there's a putrid gay FBI agent, a little like the fanatic zealot played by Michael Shannon in Boardwalk Empire. The show is a swim in a sewer and everyone is, more or less, corrupt and vicious. Jason Bateman's exceptionally involute and claustrophobically controlled performance is also key to the show's staying power -- Marty Byrde scarcely reacts to any of the horrific trouble in which he always finds himself. His cell-phone plays crickets when he gets a call, usually someone summoning him to a meeting in some miserable dive or remote country lane where he can be threatened, pushed around, and forced to participate, if reluctantly, in the torture of one or the other of his associates. When told by the Mexican cartel's lawyer that the gangster are planning to kidnap and torture his children to death, Marty gulps hard so that his throat bulges a little and his eyes seem to protrude only slightly -- a tiny vein in his temple dilates for a second, but otherwise he maintains his steely composure. A little of this goes a long way and Marty has to gulp down his terror about every half-hour in the film and, although the effect is always impressive, I don't think his muted, strangulated performance is really sustainable in the long run. On the other hand, if he were more demonstrative, I think the show might by unwatchably hysterical.
From beginning to end, the show is a guilty pleasure. The nature of this pleasure isn't pretty and it's not pleasant to describe: someone is bullying someone else, but, then, a bigger and more horribly effective bully knocks the wind out of the first bad guy. The entire show consists of ever more awful villains each strutting for their short period on screen and, then, being cowed and humiliated by even more vicious bad guys. In the opening episode, a rude teenage kid at a car-park won't even look up at the skinny lady lawyer who is trying to question him. We immediately sympathize with lady lawyer. The kid uses an expletive and tells her to get off the property. This kind of stupid and rude behavior deserves come-uppance and we get that in spades -- a Mexican gunman blows off the rude kid's hand and, as he pleads for mercy, pumps about eight shots into his face. It's satisfying in an awful kind of way because we know the logic of the show is, ultimately, to expose the cruel and importunate arrogance of the lady lawyer to some even more awful retribution -- although what this will be we don't know. In one scene, the bad guys are coming to kill a member of the Snell family who has crossed the Mexican mob. When the bad guys close in, the patriarch Jacob Snell takes things into his own hand by bludgeoning his own son to death -- the code demands a sacrifice and to save Darlene, who has a propensity for committing sudden, enraged murders, Jacob has to kill the boy. Darlene won't forgive him and, in fact, murders Jacob in episode nine (or nineteen, depending how you count). But before the murder, there is a flash-back and we see the first time that Jacob Snell laid eyes on his destiny -- he was Vietnam vet come back to the Ozarks and the young and beautiful Darlene seduces him, yanking him out of a small-town café to a cold-looking dark lake where they go skinny-dipping. To establish the year that this occurs, the soundtrack plays Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman". At the end of the episode when Darlene hugs the dying Jacob in a sort of awful, white-trash Liebestod, the camera swoons upward. Jacob's fading vision gives us a POV that shows Darlene as she looked when she first seduced him forty years earlier and, as the camera cranes upward, we hear "Wichita Lineman" again. There's a lot of wish fulfillment in this show -- people stalk around punching each other out while their pockets are literally lined with greenbacks. Millions of dollars are stashed in caskets and walls. So bad guys get their comeuppance, bullies are bullied, and, everyone is flush with cash.
Sunday, September 9, 2018
Ex Libris
Borges said: "I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library." Ample justification for this vision may be found in Frederick Wiseman's remarkably cheerful and fascinating documentary Ex Libris (2017). This film, an institutional study of the New York Public Library, is built on an epic scale -- the movie is 197 minutes long. However, it wears its length well and, in fact, is sufficiently interesting, and, even, inspiring enough to avoid tedium. In fact, the activities of the library are so immense and variegated that, if anything, the film doesn't exactly seem to do them justice -- it could easily be another hour long without losing its peculiar charm. Some sequences, indeed, feel too short -- there is one scene in which a man in a wheelchair inserts some kind of card in a cassette box and, then, flings the cassettes into a big bin; the man works with astonishing speed and hurls the cassettes as if he is angry at them -- Wiseman eschews names, music, narration, and makes no use of explanatory titles: he is a purist and presents his images as if unmediated and, so, this sequence, an episode in the huge film that is very interesting and, in fact, departs a little from the idyllic tone of the rest of the movie, remains enigmatic: who is this man? what is his actual mood? and what the hell is he doing? Why is he working so fast? There is no explanation of this sequence and so we are left to our own imaginative devices, an interesting approach to documentary filmmaking, but one that is, sometimes, a little frustrating. Although Wiseman presents his movies, almost all of them institutional studies, as the simple, unvarnished truth, in fact, they are highly complex, and carefully contrived, artifices -- Wiseman spends much more time editing than shooting his films and, of course, carefully controls what we see. His vision of the institution that he documents is concealed, but, nonetheless, forcefully evident across the length of the film. In contrast with some of his subjects, for instance his film simply entitled High School, Wiseman has unalloyed affection for New York's vast public library system and this is on fulsome display in this movie.
One of the pleasures of watching Wiseman's films is that gradually, over hours, characters emerge. We see the same people, none of them ever identified, and, gradually, build up a sense for their personalities and quirks. Similarly, Wiseman tethers Ex Libris to a sort of loose structure by sequences that punctuate his material -- these are shots of the iconic façade and entrance hall to the main library facility that seems to be at 5th Avenue and 41st Street. Every fifteen minutes or so, the film reverts to this location, shot at all hours of the day, and we see tourists on the steps taking selfies of themselves in front of the library's famous portico. We also see tourists in Astor Hall, the entry way to the library, milling about, taking photographs, and sometimes attending noon time presentations by famous writers -- everyone, including the presenter, stands for these talks. At dawn, the camera shows street people sleeping in the shadow of the building. The famous lions flanking the entrance to the library first appear about two hours into the film although they are on ubiquitous in stylized forms on flags shown at the various branches of the library that the film explores -- the film tutors us to recognize the red and white flag as the sign for a branch library. As the film progresses, periodically, we see members of its governing body, people who perpetually proclaim that the library succeeds by its "public and private partnerships", a mantra for the notion that the more the library shows its benevolent public face, that is, the more people it serves, the more private philanthropists will donate to the library. The impulse in the film is to show that the library is a powerful, behemoth force for good and that it inspires good in others. To this end, we see a tired-looking blonde woman who seems to be one of the library's executives -- she presides over various meetings, including several in branches serving poor neighborhoods. A very dignified Black woman with a shaved head seems to have something to do with the Schomburg Center, a Harlem archive associated with the library -- she almost never speaks but is a powerful presence in the administrative scenes. A number of handsome younger men appear as well, more or less indistinguishable from one another -- they are up and coming administrators and hustlers. With one exception (an U.S. army recruiting officer), everyone in the film speaks with fantastic, unscripted eloquence -- there are many marvelous, hyper-literate speeches in the film including a marvelous Ph.d-level dissertation on Marxism and the criticism of bourgeois society from the right (the works of ... Slaves without Masters) delivered by a brilliantly eloquent American Indian woman -- she's chubby, wears gaudy silver jewelry, and seems to be speaking to a group of elderly Jewish and Chinese people at a Branch library and, I'm persuaded, that she's about the most intelligent person you and I will hear speak during the next dozen or so calendar months.
The movie is encyclopedic like the library that it documents. We see Richard Dawkins pontificating about science and religion, pointing out that the endeavor of knowledge is cooperative (and, therefore, establishing from the outset Wiseman's theme). A brilliant Black scholar speaks on the Koran and the Atlantic slave trade. There is a Job Fair, a half-dozen board meetings of the governors of the library (more talk of the public-private partnership),a sequence in which librarians at an after-school day care teach children how to read, images of micro-fiche being made and used, fifteen minutes in the archives of the world's largest copy-right free picture library, a Jewish scholar discussing delicatessens and the sexual symbolism of pastrami and salami. Elvis Costello in an interview, undercuts one of Greil Marcus' more elaborate theories and presents an image of his father on TV performing "If I had a Hammer," a highlight in the movie. An older Black poet speaks and we see several chamber ensembles performing in an auditorium associated with the library branch in Lincoln Center. Old Chinese men read Hong Kong newspapers in the Chinatown branch, old Jews discuss Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera in a book club, and librarians teach the blind how to read braille (Wiseman cuts away to a service dog licking its genitals). Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers a spectacular poetry reading and a sign language interpreter shows how she imports emotion into her "signing" at plays and musicals on Broadway. We see conveyor belts sorting books from the circulation library and snapping them into bins to be delivered to the various branches; a little girl tries to get a library card and the head of the custodians delivers a report on physical plant improvements. The library loans out hot spot electronics and lap tops and the administrators debate e-books and the role of bestsellers in the collection. Scholars study handwritten letters by Yeats and William Burroughs and a curator shows a group of old people wonderful woodcuts and engravings by Durer and Rembrandt. Administrators discuss policies toward the homeless -- the homeless are not allowed to sleep in the library, but the film, then, shows us a montage of all sorts of people napping in the reading rooms. At a lecture, Patti Smith says that history also includes dreams and visions and mistakes. Teenagers use a Branch as a hang-out and an actor recites Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark for an audio book. More old men are sleeping in a serene, silent branch near a green park. The great and wealthy gather in a banqueting hall lit by luminaria (brown paper bags with candles in them) for a fundraiser. The tired-looking blonde lady is dolled-up and looks about fifteen years younger.
Carnegie's bequest to America was that no one should live farther from a public library than they can walk -- this is the core of the so-called "public private" relationship to public services that the film espouses. At one point, a woman says that "the library must not fail" and, for a moment, the quotidian seems majestic and heroic. The head librarian, the tired-looking blonde woman, finds out that the most checked-out resource by local educators is the file on "Baby Animals" -- "everyone loves baby animals," a cheerful Black librarian says, but she points that both parents and children have made the second-most checked-out resource materials on fractions. There are patterns artfully woven into the film -- in the first five minutes someone asks an information librarian about the Gutenberg Bible. A half hour before the film ends, we see the Gutenberg Bible on display. I'm sure there are other motifs that reoccur, but on first watching the film is so long and complex that it is hard to appreciate the movie's structural underpinnings.
Wiseman is 89 now -- he was 87 when he directed this astonishingly youthful and optimistic film. Unlike Ken Burns, a filmmaker that I dislike, Wiseman is America's cinematic Whitman -- this film is a vast and inspiring catalogue of good things. Of course, it's not true -- Wiseman doesn't show homeless people being escorted out of toilets by security. The Board meetings that he films are preternaturally calm and harmonious. No one gets angry. There are no quarrels and no disputes as to the library's function, which, in effect, seems to be universal. The New York that Wiseman shows is sunny, clean, filled with ultra-articulate and super-smart people. There is no ethnic tension, no disputes between labor and management, no debate about objectives, nothing even approximating racism. This is a wonderful film that depicts an idealized version of the American community -- in the age of Trump, such a work is salubrious and it should be seen by everyone. The film is a fiction, but it's not a mean-spirited or bitter fiction. I hope that Wiseman's generosity of spirit is somehow contagious.
One of the pleasures of watching Wiseman's films is that gradually, over hours, characters emerge. We see the same people, none of them ever identified, and, gradually, build up a sense for their personalities and quirks. Similarly, Wiseman tethers Ex Libris to a sort of loose structure by sequences that punctuate his material -- these are shots of the iconic façade and entrance hall to the main library facility that seems to be at 5th Avenue and 41st Street. Every fifteen minutes or so, the film reverts to this location, shot at all hours of the day, and we see tourists on the steps taking selfies of themselves in front of the library's famous portico. We also see tourists in Astor Hall, the entry way to the library, milling about, taking photographs, and sometimes attending noon time presentations by famous writers -- everyone, including the presenter, stands for these talks. At dawn, the camera shows street people sleeping in the shadow of the building. The famous lions flanking the entrance to the library first appear about two hours into the film although they are on ubiquitous in stylized forms on flags shown at the various branches of the library that the film explores -- the film tutors us to recognize the red and white flag as the sign for a branch library. As the film progresses, periodically, we see members of its governing body, people who perpetually proclaim that the library succeeds by its "public and private partnerships", a mantra for the notion that the more the library shows its benevolent public face, that is, the more people it serves, the more private philanthropists will donate to the library. The impulse in the film is to show that the library is a powerful, behemoth force for good and that it inspires good in others. To this end, we see a tired-looking blonde woman who seems to be one of the library's executives -- she presides over various meetings, including several in branches serving poor neighborhoods. A very dignified Black woman with a shaved head seems to have something to do with the Schomburg Center, a Harlem archive associated with the library -- she almost never speaks but is a powerful presence in the administrative scenes. A number of handsome younger men appear as well, more or less indistinguishable from one another -- they are up and coming administrators and hustlers. With one exception (an U.S. army recruiting officer), everyone in the film speaks with fantastic, unscripted eloquence -- there are many marvelous, hyper-literate speeches in the film including a marvelous Ph.d-level dissertation on Marxism and the criticism of bourgeois society from the right (the works of ... Slaves without Masters) delivered by a brilliantly eloquent American Indian woman -- she's chubby, wears gaudy silver jewelry, and seems to be speaking to a group of elderly Jewish and Chinese people at a Branch library and, I'm persuaded, that she's about the most intelligent person you and I will hear speak during the next dozen or so calendar months.
The movie is encyclopedic like the library that it documents. We see Richard Dawkins pontificating about science and religion, pointing out that the endeavor of knowledge is cooperative (and, therefore, establishing from the outset Wiseman's theme). A brilliant Black scholar speaks on the Koran and the Atlantic slave trade. There is a Job Fair, a half-dozen board meetings of the governors of the library (more talk of the public-private partnership),a sequence in which librarians at an after-school day care teach children how to read, images of micro-fiche being made and used, fifteen minutes in the archives of the world's largest copy-right free picture library, a Jewish scholar discussing delicatessens and the sexual symbolism of pastrami and salami. Elvis Costello in an interview, undercuts one of Greil Marcus' more elaborate theories and presents an image of his father on TV performing "If I had a Hammer," a highlight in the movie. An older Black poet speaks and we see several chamber ensembles performing in an auditorium associated with the library branch in Lincoln Center. Old Chinese men read Hong Kong newspapers in the Chinatown branch, old Jews discuss Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera in a book club, and librarians teach the blind how to read braille (Wiseman cuts away to a service dog licking its genitals). Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers a spectacular poetry reading and a sign language interpreter shows how she imports emotion into her "signing" at plays and musicals on Broadway. We see conveyor belts sorting books from the circulation library and snapping them into bins to be delivered to the various branches; a little girl tries to get a library card and the head of the custodians delivers a report on physical plant improvements. The library loans out hot spot electronics and lap tops and the administrators debate e-books and the role of bestsellers in the collection. Scholars study handwritten letters by Yeats and William Burroughs and a curator shows a group of old people wonderful woodcuts and engravings by Durer and Rembrandt. Administrators discuss policies toward the homeless -- the homeless are not allowed to sleep in the library, but the film, then, shows us a montage of all sorts of people napping in the reading rooms. At a lecture, Patti Smith says that history also includes dreams and visions and mistakes. Teenagers use a Branch as a hang-out and an actor recites Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark for an audio book. More old men are sleeping in a serene, silent branch near a green park. The great and wealthy gather in a banqueting hall lit by luminaria (brown paper bags with candles in them) for a fundraiser. The tired-looking blonde lady is dolled-up and looks about fifteen years younger.
Carnegie's bequest to America was that no one should live farther from a public library than they can walk -- this is the core of the so-called "public private" relationship to public services that the film espouses. At one point, a woman says that "the library must not fail" and, for a moment, the quotidian seems majestic and heroic. The head librarian, the tired-looking blonde woman, finds out that the most checked-out resource by local educators is the file on "Baby Animals" -- "everyone loves baby animals," a cheerful Black librarian says, but she points that both parents and children have made the second-most checked-out resource materials on fractions. There are patterns artfully woven into the film -- in the first five minutes someone asks an information librarian about the Gutenberg Bible. A half hour before the film ends, we see the Gutenberg Bible on display. I'm sure there are other motifs that reoccur, but on first watching the film is so long and complex that it is hard to appreciate the movie's structural underpinnings.
Wiseman is 89 now -- he was 87 when he directed this astonishingly youthful and optimistic film. Unlike Ken Burns, a filmmaker that I dislike, Wiseman is America's cinematic Whitman -- this film is a vast and inspiring catalogue of good things. Of course, it's not true -- Wiseman doesn't show homeless people being escorted out of toilets by security. The Board meetings that he films are preternaturally calm and harmonious. No one gets angry. There are no quarrels and no disputes as to the library's function, which, in effect, seems to be universal. The New York that Wiseman shows is sunny, clean, filled with ultra-articulate and super-smart people. There is no ethnic tension, no disputes between labor and management, no debate about objectives, nothing even approximating racism. This is a wonderful film that depicts an idealized version of the American community -- in the age of Trump, such a work is salubrious and it should be seen by everyone. The film is a fiction, but it's not a mean-spirited or bitter fiction. I hope that Wiseman's generosity of spirit is somehow contagious.
Saturday, September 8, 2018
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
Maxwell Anderson, a reliably dull playwright, scored a Broadway success with The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex -- a melodrama about an alleged love affair between Queen Elizabeth and Essex, one of her cavaliers. Michael Curtiz adapted the play to film for Warner Brothers in 1939 and the movie was a prestige production -- it stars Bette Davis at her most imperious and the perilously handsome Errol Flynn as Essex. It's not a very good movie, but one that is important I think.
The plot is static, revolving around the aging Queen's hopeless desire for the much-younger Essex -- it's really just a situation with variations and the unhappy end for Essex is pretty clearly presaged from the first encounter between them dramatized by the movie. Essex has come from a great naval victory in which he has sent the Spanish fleet to the bottom of the harbor at Cadiz. Elizabeth, however, petulantly berates him for failing to save for her the Spanish treasure, gold and jewels, on the ships that he has destroyed. She pouts and, when he expresses dissatisfaction, exiles him to the thankless task of exterminating Irish rebels. Of course, the whole time Essex is hunting Irishmen on the Emerald Isle, Elizabeth is pining away for him back at the palace at Whitehall. She writes him letters, but these are intercepted by vicious courtiers, apparently Sir Francis Bacon (played by the ever-stalwart Donald Crisp), and Elizabeth ultimately assumes that Essex is snubbing her. She cuts off his supplies and troops with the result that the doughty Irish rebels humiliate him in the field. When he returns to London, she summons him to her throne-room for a long duet in which both the Queen and Essex express love for one another. Essex has essentially staged a coup -- his men are occupying the castle. When the Queen says that she loves Essex, he withdraws his troops as a gesture of good faith whereupon she has him promptly arrested and thrown in the Tower of London. He broods. She broods. There is another duet and, then, Essex has his head cut-off ending the film. This is all staged with maximum pageantry and the colorful costumes, particularly the Queen's gowns, are truly spectacular -- the film is shot in Technicolor. The speeches are in faux-Elizabethan verse that is not really effective -- it's more irritating than really poetic. Bette Davis is astounding as the tormented, unrequited Queen -- she stutters and makes her hands flutter around her hips hidden by the grandiose bustles that she wears: her performance is integral to how we think a queen should act. Indeed, Davis' performance seems to have been taken as a model for just about everything (including TV interviews) that Katherine Hepburn did after The African Queen. And Davis is an utterly bizarre apparition in the film -- her make-up is not so much pale white as a sort of metallic leaden pallor. Her lips are pinched and her hair is pulled so fiercely back away from her forehead that she seems to be bald. Her eyes are impenetrable and, oddly enough, here seem very tiny, almost Asian in their configuration -- this is curious because Davis, of course, was famous for her large, seductively luminous eyes. She seems to be two-dimensional, flat as a paramecium -- she has width but no breadth. Her gowns are breathtaking -- layers of shimmering satin, pearl brocades, and ice-white ruffs under her throat, but the garments are ultimately inhuman: they shape her in two dimension and her waist is so tightly corseted that her form looks monstrous. Indeed, Davis' Queen Elizabeth is conceived as a sort of monster -- she looks nothing at all like the other women in the movie, most of them ruddy-faced and showing lots of décolletage. The Queen, by contrast, is an eerie mannequin. She's so scary that it doesn't seem possible that the remarkably handsome, but robust Errol Flynn could possibly love her -- she is like some creature from another planet compared to the other humans beings in the movie. (The Queen recognizes that she looks exceedingly strange -- in one spectacular scene, she smashes up a bunch of mirrors in recognition that she is too old and ugly to love Essex; this is while her court ladies are both taunting, and regaling her, with Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Nymph" together with Raleigh's reply -- Raleigh is played by Vincent Price.) As I watched the film, a number of the sequences seemed familiar to me -- the monstrous queen lurking under the groined vaults in her huge, gloomy palace, the shadows of henchmen and musicians limned on the dark, heavy walls, the ever-present sense of violence surrounding the Kabuki Queen. It's my contention that this film, particularly with respect to its bizarre portrayal of Elizabeth, is a direct source of Eisenstein's even more peculiar and radically strange Ivan the Terrible, particularly the Technicolor sequences in Part Two. Both Curtiz's Elizabeth and Eisenstein's Ivan are monsters surrounded by relatively normal people.
The dialogue in the film is spectacularly tortured. In some respects, the interplay between Elizabeth and Essex is like some queer imperial version of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Long sequences are just campy bickering. At the climax, Elizabeth asks Essex if he loves her. Somewhat improbably Essex says he loves her, wants to marry her, and desires, in that way, to become King. She demands that he love her without requiring that he rule over the country. He refuses. She, then, tells him that he would be a terrible King because of his lust for glory and fame. After sulking a little Essex agrees with her. He says that she's right to point out that he would be a terrible king. He, then, says that he supposes he could love her without being king but, if it were suggested that he made this accommodation with her to avoid beheading, he would be shamed. So, then, Elizabeth agrees he can become King. But now he is convinced that he lacks "kingly stuff" and sulks some more before stomping down through a trap-door that somehow connects the throne-room with the Tower. As he departs, Elizabeth cries out that she'll give him anything to be with him as his lover. But it's too late -- the bitchy Essex has abandoned her for the tender mercies of the headsman on the scaffold. This stuff is ineffably silly and shockingly dull, but the film is mounted lavishly and, from a purely visual standpoint, it's surrealistic to see the lively robust Errol Flynn embracing the emaciated, gaunt and monstrous corpse-queen played by Bette Davis.
(An interesting sidelight, this was the first film in which Nanette Fabray, here credited under her actual name Nanette Fabares appeared. Nanette Fabray was a later fixture in Hollywood, most famous for playing Betty Comden in the Fred Astaire - Vincent Minnelli masterpiece The Band Wagon.)
The plot is static, revolving around the aging Queen's hopeless desire for the much-younger Essex -- it's really just a situation with variations and the unhappy end for Essex is pretty clearly presaged from the first encounter between them dramatized by the movie. Essex has come from a great naval victory in which he has sent the Spanish fleet to the bottom of the harbor at Cadiz. Elizabeth, however, petulantly berates him for failing to save for her the Spanish treasure, gold and jewels, on the ships that he has destroyed. She pouts and, when he expresses dissatisfaction, exiles him to the thankless task of exterminating Irish rebels. Of course, the whole time Essex is hunting Irishmen on the Emerald Isle, Elizabeth is pining away for him back at the palace at Whitehall. She writes him letters, but these are intercepted by vicious courtiers, apparently Sir Francis Bacon (played by the ever-stalwart Donald Crisp), and Elizabeth ultimately assumes that Essex is snubbing her. She cuts off his supplies and troops with the result that the doughty Irish rebels humiliate him in the field. When he returns to London, she summons him to her throne-room for a long duet in which both the Queen and Essex express love for one another. Essex has essentially staged a coup -- his men are occupying the castle. When the Queen says that she loves Essex, he withdraws his troops as a gesture of good faith whereupon she has him promptly arrested and thrown in the Tower of London. He broods. She broods. There is another duet and, then, Essex has his head cut-off ending the film. This is all staged with maximum pageantry and the colorful costumes, particularly the Queen's gowns, are truly spectacular -- the film is shot in Technicolor. The speeches are in faux-Elizabethan verse that is not really effective -- it's more irritating than really poetic. Bette Davis is astounding as the tormented, unrequited Queen -- she stutters and makes her hands flutter around her hips hidden by the grandiose bustles that she wears: her performance is integral to how we think a queen should act. Indeed, Davis' performance seems to have been taken as a model for just about everything (including TV interviews) that Katherine Hepburn did after The African Queen. And Davis is an utterly bizarre apparition in the film -- her make-up is not so much pale white as a sort of metallic leaden pallor. Her lips are pinched and her hair is pulled so fiercely back away from her forehead that she seems to be bald. Her eyes are impenetrable and, oddly enough, here seem very tiny, almost Asian in their configuration -- this is curious because Davis, of course, was famous for her large, seductively luminous eyes. She seems to be two-dimensional, flat as a paramecium -- she has width but no breadth. Her gowns are breathtaking -- layers of shimmering satin, pearl brocades, and ice-white ruffs under her throat, but the garments are ultimately inhuman: they shape her in two dimension and her waist is so tightly corseted that her form looks monstrous. Indeed, Davis' Queen Elizabeth is conceived as a sort of monster -- she looks nothing at all like the other women in the movie, most of them ruddy-faced and showing lots of décolletage. The Queen, by contrast, is an eerie mannequin. She's so scary that it doesn't seem possible that the remarkably handsome, but robust Errol Flynn could possibly love her -- she is like some creature from another planet compared to the other humans beings in the movie. (The Queen recognizes that she looks exceedingly strange -- in one spectacular scene, she smashes up a bunch of mirrors in recognition that she is too old and ugly to love Essex; this is while her court ladies are both taunting, and regaling her, with Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Nymph" together with Raleigh's reply -- Raleigh is played by Vincent Price.) As I watched the film, a number of the sequences seemed familiar to me -- the monstrous queen lurking under the groined vaults in her huge, gloomy palace, the shadows of henchmen and musicians limned on the dark, heavy walls, the ever-present sense of violence surrounding the Kabuki Queen. It's my contention that this film, particularly with respect to its bizarre portrayal of Elizabeth, is a direct source of Eisenstein's even more peculiar and radically strange Ivan the Terrible, particularly the Technicolor sequences in Part Two. Both Curtiz's Elizabeth and Eisenstein's Ivan are monsters surrounded by relatively normal people.
The dialogue in the film is spectacularly tortured. In some respects, the interplay between Elizabeth and Essex is like some queer imperial version of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Long sequences are just campy bickering. At the climax, Elizabeth asks Essex if he loves her. Somewhat improbably Essex says he loves her, wants to marry her, and desires, in that way, to become King. She demands that he love her without requiring that he rule over the country. He refuses. She, then, tells him that he would be a terrible King because of his lust for glory and fame. After sulking a little Essex agrees with her. He says that she's right to point out that he would be a terrible king. He, then, says that he supposes he could love her without being king but, if it were suggested that he made this accommodation with her to avoid beheading, he would be shamed. So, then, Elizabeth agrees he can become King. But now he is convinced that he lacks "kingly stuff" and sulks some more before stomping down through a trap-door that somehow connects the throne-room with the Tower. As he departs, Elizabeth cries out that she'll give him anything to be with him as his lover. But it's too late -- the bitchy Essex has abandoned her for the tender mercies of the headsman on the scaffold. This stuff is ineffably silly and shockingly dull, but the film is mounted lavishly and, from a purely visual standpoint, it's surrealistic to see the lively robust Errol Flynn embracing the emaciated, gaunt and monstrous corpse-queen played by Bette Davis.
(An interesting sidelight, this was the first film in which Nanette Fabray, here credited under her actual name Nanette Fabares appeared. Nanette Fabray was a later fixture in Hollywood, most famous for playing Betty Comden in the Fred Astaire - Vincent Minnelli masterpiece The Band Wagon.)
Monday, September 3, 2018
Darkest Hour
Darkest Hour (2018) is a companion piece to Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, both films released about the same time. Both pictures are radical in conception. Nolan's Dunkirk uses different time scales cross-cut to imply simultaneity when, in fact, the film shows us explicitly that the events occur within wildly different systems of duration -- the pilot's war is only two hours long while the infantryman's travails last several days. Darkest Hour obsessively materializes the film's title -- the movie is shot almost completely in gloomy shadow: Churchill speaks to parliament gathered in a black well dark as a cistern; when he goes among the people, he descends to the gloomy underground, boarding a subway, and the edges of the frame are sooty, forming a black oval around the people in the train car; King Edward's chambers are drowned in darkness and, sometimes, Churchill himself is envisioned as occupying a little rectangle of Rembrandt-brown color in the midst of impenetrable darkness, a postage stamp-sized zone of faint light. Most of the film is set in subterranean quarters, the War Rooms, buried under London and, whenever, anyone goes abroad, the weather is leaden, grey, and rainy. The only exception to this principle of blackness is a couple scenes showing aerial bombardment -- orange flames flaring against the black and the ill-weather civilian rescue of the troops at Dunkirk, also composed in somber, monochrome. I know of no picture as universally black as this film except some of the early half-experimental films of David Lynch -- Eraserhead was similarly dark as was The Elephant Man.
Darkest Hour is exceptionally well-made and effectively directed by Joe Wright. Gary Oldman's performance as Churchill is suitably majestic. The picture inexorably captures the darkness growing about Churchill beleaguered by a cabinet that insists that he sue for piece with Hitler. Further, the film equates this darkness with Churchill's periodic bouts with severe depression. The movie contains several of Churchill's most famous speeches from the era including "blood, sweat, toil, and tears" and "we will fight on the beaches..." At the end of the movie, as Parliament wildly embraces Churchill's rejection of peace initiatives, Neville Chamberlain laments that he "has mobilized the English language for war." And this response points to a moral difficulty that is intrinsic to the film and one that the motion picture doesn't really try to solve. Churchill's rhetoric is courageous, brilliant, and stirring, but isn't there something a wee bit problematic about the premise: who knows what a negotiated peace with Hitler would have looked like in May 1940? And isn't peace always preferable to war? It's easy to stir people to war. We've seen this task accomplished with almost no effort in this country post 9 -11. In fact, it's pretty easy to get a consensus that torturing enemy terrorists is perfectly okay -- just ask the commuter in the subway. In the film, Churchill takes the psychic temperature of his people by riding in a subway car and asking them rhetorical questions about whether they wish to surrender to Hitler. Of course, if the question is posed in that way, you can always mobilize the man on the street to join the crusade. In this country, most everyone was in favor of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until, suddenly, they weren't. In fact, every nation enters into war with high hopes of an easy and glorious triumph over evil, subhuman and savage enemies. But when the boys start coming home in body-bags, the issues suddenly become much more intricate. Darkest Hour is about a politician steadfastly, stubbornly, and effectively pulling all of the levers of power to urge continued warfare. Further, the film argues that the man who compromises the least, who remains the most dogmatically true to his principles, will prevail and, indeed, earn everlasting fame. But, in fact, isn't our current political system in the United States a victim of ideologies that insist that no compromise is possible and that political purity is the only real measure by which a statesman must be measured? Fundamentally, war is easy; making peace is hard. And Darkest Hour celebrates uncompromising belligerence as virtue -- "doubling down" on enmity, a strategy in which our present president excels. Churchill's war ended with the Soviet Union in ascendancy over half of Europe with many ancient and noble nations under the heel of Communist dictatorship for half a century. Was this a good outcome to the Great Crusade? Everything in Darkest Hour collaborates to enforce the impression of the alcoholic and flawed Churchill's greatness -- and there can be no quarrel with the notion that Churchill was a great man. But were his speeches stirring the British people to a willingness to "die choked in their own blood" before compromising with the enemy all that different from Hitler's harangues, particularly those that he made at the end of the War, summoning the German people to sacrifice themselves en masse in suicidal defense of the homeland? Didn't Hitler equally mobilize the German language for war? Is mobilizing any language to make war a good thing?
Darkest Hour is exceptionally well-made and effectively directed by Joe Wright. Gary Oldman's performance as Churchill is suitably majestic. The picture inexorably captures the darkness growing about Churchill beleaguered by a cabinet that insists that he sue for piece with Hitler. Further, the film equates this darkness with Churchill's periodic bouts with severe depression. The movie contains several of Churchill's most famous speeches from the era including "blood, sweat, toil, and tears" and "we will fight on the beaches..." At the end of the movie, as Parliament wildly embraces Churchill's rejection of peace initiatives, Neville Chamberlain laments that he "has mobilized the English language for war." And this response points to a moral difficulty that is intrinsic to the film and one that the motion picture doesn't really try to solve. Churchill's rhetoric is courageous, brilliant, and stirring, but isn't there something a wee bit problematic about the premise: who knows what a negotiated peace with Hitler would have looked like in May 1940? And isn't peace always preferable to war? It's easy to stir people to war. We've seen this task accomplished with almost no effort in this country post 9 -11. In fact, it's pretty easy to get a consensus that torturing enemy terrorists is perfectly okay -- just ask the commuter in the subway. In the film, Churchill takes the psychic temperature of his people by riding in a subway car and asking them rhetorical questions about whether they wish to surrender to Hitler. Of course, if the question is posed in that way, you can always mobilize the man on the street to join the crusade. In this country, most everyone was in favor of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan until, suddenly, they weren't. In fact, every nation enters into war with high hopes of an easy and glorious triumph over evil, subhuman and savage enemies. But when the boys start coming home in body-bags, the issues suddenly become much more intricate. Darkest Hour is about a politician steadfastly, stubbornly, and effectively pulling all of the levers of power to urge continued warfare. Further, the film argues that the man who compromises the least, who remains the most dogmatically true to his principles, will prevail and, indeed, earn everlasting fame. But, in fact, isn't our current political system in the United States a victim of ideologies that insist that no compromise is possible and that political purity is the only real measure by which a statesman must be measured? Fundamentally, war is easy; making peace is hard. And Darkest Hour celebrates uncompromising belligerence as virtue -- "doubling down" on enmity, a strategy in which our present president excels. Churchill's war ended with the Soviet Union in ascendancy over half of Europe with many ancient and noble nations under the heel of Communist dictatorship for half a century. Was this a good outcome to the Great Crusade? Everything in Darkest Hour collaborates to enforce the impression of the alcoholic and flawed Churchill's greatness -- and there can be no quarrel with the notion that Churchill was a great man. But were his speeches stirring the British people to a willingness to "die choked in their own blood" before compromising with the enemy all that different from Hitler's harangues, particularly those that he made at the end of the War, summoning the German people to sacrifice themselves en masse in suicidal defense of the homeland? Didn't Hitler equally mobilize the German language for war? Is mobilizing any language to make war a good thing?
Things to Come
William Cameron Menzies' Things to Come (1936) based on a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells is startlingly bad -- worse, it's silly, and silliness, of course, is the kiss of death for science fiction. The film stars Raymond Massey as an idealist with Socialist leanings who, later, plays the part of his own grandson, a technocrat who is part of the New World Order. Relatively restrained in the first half of the film, Massey chews the scenery at the film's climax -- his eyes enlarge and seem to protrude from his skull and his voice assumes the ranting tone of Hitler or Mussolini. It's completely unconvincing, an attempt to achieve an effect by brute force, something that almost never succeeds. This is a pity because the film's first twenty minutes are very impressive and frightening. It's Christmas in Everytown (a place bordered by a big distinctively shaped peak that looks like Table Mountain in Cape Town -- in fact, the mountain has the same function of the peak in Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire acting as an imperturbable and constant feature despite the changes in scenery at its base.) In the darkness, there is "war fever" -- everywhere we see placards announcing the imminence of war -- and the Christmas carols that people sing have a sinister, bellicose sound, slightly off-key it seems. The shadows of the city are fragmented into a montage of glaring faces and off-kilter, spiky expressionist images. Soon enough a great armada of biplanes crosses the English Channel, flying over the White Cliffs of Dover to bomb Everywhere Town (of course, it looks like London complete with a statue of Nelson, Trafalgar Circus and St. Paul's Cathedral). Poison gas is used and a beatific boy whom we saw looking with delight at a model castle and train is shown smashed in the ruins of the city. The war lasts thirty years, a montage of tanks that become increasingly sophisticated and shadowy marching soldiers. When it is over, civilization has been spoiled and the wrecked city is now in the hands of a ranting war lord. Raymond Massey appears in a streamlined prop-driven bi-plane and, disastrously for the movie, hops out of the plane wearing what seems to be a black bathtub around his shoulders and head. (The film's costumes are absolutely ridiculous -- worse, in some low-angle shots, the genitals of the male actors are pretty clearly depicted in their weird trousers.) Massey's character gets tossed in the dungeon after he makes a speech about a group of aviators who have preserved civilization through an organization called Wings over the World. After some pointless vignettes, including the original of time-honored post-apocalyptic scene in which horses pull a car like a chariot into a marketplace, the Wings over the World aviators attack the town, hurtling down "peace bombs" that make everyone fall asleep. The film, then, fast-forwards to the year 2036, one hundred years from the film's first Christmas scenes. For some unknown reason, the men of the future have hollowed out a mountain to build a white and gleaming city that looks quite a bit like a fabulous Embassy Suites hotel --it's all white atrium and gardens and glass-faced elevators rising and falling in glass tubes. The technocrats who run this society have decided to send Raymond Massey's daughter and a young man into orbit around the moon, firing them into space though a gigantic white cannon supported by a huge gantry -- the absurdly phallic space-howitzer is a muzzle-loader. Anti-progress rioters attack the enormous cannon -- they swarm over its esplanades and causeways like infuriated ants. But the cannon is fired and the comely couple ejaculated into space in their capsule and Massey, then, gets to rant some more about man exploring the universe before the picture ends at a sprightly 88 minutes. It's really awful on all levels. The sets are enormous and impressive but the special effects, obviously projected on screens embedded in the scenery are completely ineffective. The acting is worse than terrible. A good way to assess the skill of a film maker is to look at the actors who are not speaking but just standing around -- here the supernumeraries look inert or bored, as if they are waiting for something to happen. It's interesting to see the film's depiction of the horror that the world felt 18 years after the end of the Great War on the subject of poison gas. Gas of this kind is the film's bête noire and the best sequence in the film involves an enemy aviator, shot down by Massey's character in a dogfight. The enemy aviator's canisters of poison gas burst just as a little girl runs up to the scene of the crash. The enemy flyer gives the little girl his gas mask, musing that it is odd that he is now saving her when a minute or two earlier he was trying to drop poison gas bombs on her village. Massey chivalrously leaves his service revolver with the dying enemy who, of course, shoots himself rather than succumb ignominiously to the poison gas wafted around him.
Sunday, September 2, 2018
The Organizer
Mario Monicelli's 1963 film, called The Comrades (I' Compagni), was rebranded for American consumption as The Organizer -- presumably, this name change was designed to highlight the role of Marcello Mastrioanni in the picture: audiences like stars and Mastrioanni, known in this country from his parts in Fellini pictures, fits that bill. In fact, the Hollywood name for the film is a bit misleading -- although Mastrioanni plays a significant part in the film, he's arguably not the main character (I think the herculean worker called Domenico Pautasse plays that part) and he doesn't even appear in the picture until about half an hour has elapsed. Monicelli's picture is heavily influenced by Italian Communism and the film is really about a collective of workers employed by a Turin textile factory who engage in a long and futile strike sometime during the latter half of the 19th century. True to the film's subject, Monicelli eschews close-ups of his actors -- I don't recall a single close-shot featuring someone's face in the film, although undoubtedly there may be an isolated shot or two of this kind. The picture is filmed in greyish black and white, evoking old, half-faded photographs and the images by Giuseppe Rotunno are fantastically beautiful. Monicelli points his camera at groups of men and women, often involved in some sort of hectic activity, and he is expert at staging riots and confrontations between large groups. The film certainly presents itself as historically accurate and the images of the immense factory with its whirring fly-wheels and puffs of steam and conveyor belts spinning overhead are remarkable -- the amount of labor required to recreate a 19th century factory must have been immense but the verismo effect is integral to the film..
Workers labor 14 hour shifts in a textile factory in cold and rainy Turin. The film begins with women lighting fires to make breakfast in cramped, but reasonably comfortable-looking, stone apartments. A teenage boy named Omero leaves home and walks to work and, true to the conventions of this kind of film, there is something ominous about this young man being singled-out in this opening sequence. A man's hand gets chewed-off by an in-running geared pinch-point when he falls asleep on the job and, so, the workers petition the boss for a longer lunch-break and a 13-hour day. The factory-director protests that he can't control the terms of employment and says that he's a mere salary-man himself. The workers plot to blow the whistle ending the work-day an hour early, but they're too divided among themselves to succeed with the impromptu work stoppage and their leader, the huge and robust Pautasse is suspended without pay for two weeks. Just as groups of workers are fighting among themselves, a train disgorges Mastrioanni's character, a labor organizer who is called "the professor", and who is on the lam from the authorities. Sinagaglia, Mastrioanni's character, organizes the workers into a cohesive group and they mount a strike. (Curiously, the soldiers in town support the strike and feed the workers from their rations -- these people are Italians and they eat enormous sandwiches for lunch while swilling down heroic quantities of wine.) The strike lasts 31 days. Scabs are brought in by train as strike-breakers and there's a huge battle between the laborers on strike and the replacement workers. In the fight, Pautasse gets hit by a train and dies. The police hunt for Sinagaglia who takes refuge with a kindly prostitute -- she proclaims that her choice was streetwalking or working 14 hours a day with her hands in cold water and that she has no regrets about doing work that has saved her from the factory. The workers waiver -- both management and the strikers have reached the end of their resources and the question is who will crack first. Sinagaglia gives a fiery speech and the workers decide to seize the factory. Singing and carrying banners, they march on the factory defended by a thin line of soldiers. The soldiers are ordered to fire on the advancing workers, but only a handful of them discharge their weapons. Nonetheless, the mob withdraws leaving a single worker dead on the cobblestones -- this is, of course, Omeros. (Omeros' female relatives beat Professor Sinagaglis blamimg h im for the boy's death.) This casualty breaks the strike and the workers return to work. Professor Sinagaglia is imprisoned. In the closing scenes, we see Rauol, the man who harbored Sinagaglia in his apartment, fleeing town by jumping an outbound train. His girlfriend, who is illiterate, begs him to write to her. Throughout the film, Omero bullied his little brother into attending school -- at one point, Omero thrashes the little boy mercilessly crying out that he doesn't want him to end up as a laborer in the factory. In the film's final shot, the camera tracks with a crowd of hundreds of workers streaming in to the plant -- the last worker in the procession is Omero's little brother who has now become one of the laborers.
Monicelli is a prime representative of the school of Commedia illa Italia -- the so-called "Italian Comedy" genre of films. This a "comedy" of a kind that is not really funny. The film has some amusing situations and the workers make wise-cracks that are probably funnier in Italian than subtitles, but the picture seems to me a relatively somber anatomy of labor troubles in a factory town. (Much that the film presents is familiar to me -- I lived through the great and historic strike at the Hormel Foods meat packing plant in 1989 and have seen with my own eyes the National Guard protecting the factory from crowds of striking workers.) "Comedy" in this context seems to mean a film populated by rustic types who express themselves vividly and with vulgarity -- someone belches explosively in one scene and there is lots of crude humor. People are always punching or shoving one another and everyone shouts at high volume. Ethnic humor dominates some scenes -- a worker from Bergamo is prone to making impassioned speeches but no one can understand him because of his dialect. An impoverished Sicilian inflames anti-South sentiments among the Piedmont-dwelling workers -- they denigrate him as an "Ethiopian" or "Bedouin." When the workers strike, he alone reports to work because his family is starving. Standing alone in the factory, the Sicilian demands the right to work. When the bosses insult him, he tries to stab them but he can't get his little knife open and is marched out of the plant in handcuffs. (The workers were about to swarm back into the plant following his example but when he is arrested, this emboldens them to remain on strike.) The big boss is in a wheelchair and seems monstrously cruel -- when he enters a family party at his mansion, one of his granddaughters is playing Blind Man's bluff, waving a stick at a sort of piñata -- the boss almost runs over her with his wheelchair, not hesitating to give her a powerful whack with his cane. Among the workers, everything looks raw and impoverished -- they live in huge compounds with muddy squares between buildings. Smokestacks gush black cinders into the air. When the prostitute invites the Professor into her bed, she first orders him to "clean up a bit." This is an excellent film, although like the strike it seems a wee bit pointless -- nonetheless, the movie has an authenticity not often seen in films. Sequences in the picture have been duplicated by other filmmakers -- Bertolucci's 1900 has many images that seem to derive from this picture. On the evidence of this film, Mario Monicelli seems to be a very interesting director and, certainly, worthy of more study.
Workers labor 14 hour shifts in a textile factory in cold and rainy Turin. The film begins with women lighting fires to make breakfast in cramped, but reasonably comfortable-looking, stone apartments. A teenage boy named Omero leaves home and walks to work and, true to the conventions of this kind of film, there is something ominous about this young man being singled-out in this opening sequence. A man's hand gets chewed-off by an in-running geared pinch-point when he falls asleep on the job and, so, the workers petition the boss for a longer lunch-break and a 13-hour day. The factory-director protests that he can't control the terms of employment and says that he's a mere salary-man himself. The workers plot to blow the whistle ending the work-day an hour early, but they're too divided among themselves to succeed with the impromptu work stoppage and their leader, the huge and robust Pautasse is suspended without pay for two weeks. Just as groups of workers are fighting among themselves, a train disgorges Mastrioanni's character, a labor organizer who is called "the professor", and who is on the lam from the authorities. Sinagaglia, Mastrioanni's character, organizes the workers into a cohesive group and they mount a strike. (Curiously, the soldiers in town support the strike and feed the workers from their rations -- these people are Italians and they eat enormous sandwiches for lunch while swilling down heroic quantities of wine.) The strike lasts 31 days. Scabs are brought in by train as strike-breakers and there's a huge battle between the laborers on strike and the replacement workers. In the fight, Pautasse gets hit by a train and dies. The police hunt for Sinagaglia who takes refuge with a kindly prostitute -- she proclaims that her choice was streetwalking or working 14 hours a day with her hands in cold water and that she has no regrets about doing work that has saved her from the factory. The workers waiver -- both management and the strikers have reached the end of their resources and the question is who will crack first. Sinagaglia gives a fiery speech and the workers decide to seize the factory. Singing and carrying banners, they march on the factory defended by a thin line of soldiers. The soldiers are ordered to fire on the advancing workers, but only a handful of them discharge their weapons. Nonetheless, the mob withdraws leaving a single worker dead on the cobblestones -- this is, of course, Omeros. (Omeros' female relatives beat Professor Sinagaglis blamimg h im for the boy's death.) This casualty breaks the strike and the workers return to work. Professor Sinagaglia is imprisoned. In the closing scenes, we see Rauol, the man who harbored Sinagaglia in his apartment, fleeing town by jumping an outbound train. His girlfriend, who is illiterate, begs him to write to her. Throughout the film, Omero bullied his little brother into attending school -- at one point, Omero thrashes the little boy mercilessly crying out that he doesn't want him to end up as a laborer in the factory. In the film's final shot, the camera tracks with a crowd of hundreds of workers streaming in to the plant -- the last worker in the procession is Omero's little brother who has now become one of the laborers.
Monicelli is a prime representative of the school of Commedia illa Italia -- the so-called "Italian Comedy" genre of films. This a "comedy" of a kind that is not really funny. The film has some amusing situations and the workers make wise-cracks that are probably funnier in Italian than subtitles, but the picture seems to me a relatively somber anatomy of labor troubles in a factory town. (Much that the film presents is familiar to me -- I lived through the great and historic strike at the Hormel Foods meat packing plant in 1989 and have seen with my own eyes the National Guard protecting the factory from crowds of striking workers.) "Comedy" in this context seems to mean a film populated by rustic types who express themselves vividly and with vulgarity -- someone belches explosively in one scene and there is lots of crude humor. People are always punching or shoving one another and everyone shouts at high volume. Ethnic humor dominates some scenes -- a worker from Bergamo is prone to making impassioned speeches but no one can understand him because of his dialect. An impoverished Sicilian inflames anti-South sentiments among the Piedmont-dwelling workers -- they denigrate him as an "Ethiopian" or "Bedouin." When the workers strike, he alone reports to work because his family is starving. Standing alone in the factory, the Sicilian demands the right to work. When the bosses insult him, he tries to stab them but he can't get his little knife open and is marched out of the plant in handcuffs. (The workers were about to swarm back into the plant following his example but when he is arrested, this emboldens them to remain on strike.) The big boss is in a wheelchair and seems monstrously cruel -- when he enters a family party at his mansion, one of his granddaughters is playing Blind Man's bluff, waving a stick at a sort of piñata -- the boss almost runs over her with his wheelchair, not hesitating to give her a powerful whack with his cane. Among the workers, everything looks raw and impoverished -- they live in huge compounds with muddy squares between buildings. Smokestacks gush black cinders into the air. When the prostitute invites the Professor into her bed, she first orders him to "clean up a bit." This is an excellent film, although like the strike it seems a wee bit pointless -- nonetheless, the movie has an authenticity not often seen in films. Sequences in the picture have been duplicated by other filmmakers -- Bertolucci's 1900 has many images that seem to derive from this picture. On the evidence of this film, Mario Monicelli seems to be a very interesting director and, certainly, worthy of more study.
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