The Profound Desires of the Gods

Because Shohei Imamura's epic film, The Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), is, at least in part, a sprawling family chronicle, the viewer's first impulse is to chart the lineage of the people shown in the film.  This turns out to be a daunting objective and one that, I'm afraid, that I probably haven't properly achieved.  But, since understanding the picture involves understanding who is related to whom, I'll start with that exercise.  Imamura, periodically, puts his lurid melodrama on pause to try to unsort the Futori clan family tree -- but these efforts are, often, too little and too late.  Part of the narrative strategy of the film is reflected in its strangely occluded and constricted use of the extreme wide-screen Technicolor format in which the film is shot.  Imamura intentionally blocks his images, hiding crucial aspects of what we are supposed to be seeing.  This pictorial strategy is mirrored by the filmmaker's approach to narrative -- we only gradually tease out of the bizarre occurrences that the film shows something approaching a narrative.  Kagura, the island in the Okinawan archipelago, where the action is set is not easy to reach.  (In one scene, we see a fat pig fall off a skiff bound for the island and, then, immediately succumb to the sharks patrolling the reefs around the atoll.  When the engineer arrives in the island's suffocating heat, the first thing he does is to vomit -- it was a rough ride over the sea to Kagura.)  So, an understanding of the film's plot and the relationship between its principal characters is also intentionally confounded -- the pictures hide things, although sometimes in plain sight; simultaneously the story-line is concealed, digressive, often obscured by anthropological episodes.  My task in this note is to make it easier for you to watch this film -- a monument in Japanese cinema.  And, so, I start with the gens around which the story (or stories) revolve, the Futori clan.

Granddad in the Futori clan is a bearded elder.  If he has a name other than "Dad" or "Granddad", we don't know it.  Futori seems to have had two children, a brother and sister named respectively Nekichi and Uma.  Incest, as they say, runs in the family.  Nekichi is alleged to have had sex with his sister Uma, although it's unclear whether the act was consummated or merely intensely desired (at least, until the film's climax).  Granddad has also raped Uma or, possibly, a daughter who is not in the film named Ushi -- this is unclear to me.  The product of granddad's incest (with either his daughter Ushi or Uma) is Toriko.  Toriko is like Daisy Mae in the old Al Capp comics -- she's a nubile, mentally retarded sexpot who spends her time trying to seduce everyone in the movie.  (Her come-on line is that "my ear is itching", something that she wails while wrapping her legs around the men who try to assist her).  Toriko, accordingly, is Nekichi's sister and Granddad's daughter.  Nekichi was in the war with his buddy, Ryu, sometimes called Mr. Ryugen.  This man is the island's chief politician, a smarmy Jaycee-style  booster, who is married to Uma (Nekichi's sister and would-be mistress).  Ryu is nouveau riche in the island's economy.  A century before the action shown in the film -- which is contemporary to the movie's release (we hear planes flying over Kagura bound for Vietnam) -- Ryu's family were sugar plantation slaves.  The island was converted, sacriligiously from its ancient rice-based economy to producing sugar.  This dislocation has had a profound impact on the island's fragile economy.  The production of sugar cane requires lots of water and fresh-water is one of the things the isolated atoll-island lacks.  (At one point, Ryu shows shackles that were worn by the unfortunate forebears in his family -- the island seems to have been run once as a kind of concentration camp, a place similar to the hell depicted in Sansho the Bailiff, Mizoguchi's masterpiece.)  By 1968, Ryu's family, who are mercantile and a bit like the Snopes in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha county, has come to prominence, primarily because of a strategic alliance with island's priestly caste represented by the decrepit and in-bred Futori's -- the alliance arises from Ryu's marriage to Uma, a noro, that is, shamaness who channels the island's ancient Shinto kami (or gods) as well as the ghosts haunting the place.  Uma, notwithstanding her sacred role, is plump and cheerfully lecherous -- Ryu has to torture her periodically to get her to comply with his wishes.  It's suggested that she "prophecies" on order for the purpose of communicating Mr. Ryu's political demands to the others on the island.  We see Ryu torturing her a couple times, Imamura's nod to the pornographic "pink" (S & M) movies apparently much beloved by the Japanese public.  (This raises another difficulty with this film -- in Japanese melodrama, almost all the sex looks like rape:  it's unclear whether the rape is intended to be painful or, in fact, something that is mutually enjoyed by both participants.  Sex on the island involves a great amount of pinching and biting as well as lots of shrieking and grunting. In light of American sexual mores, particularly those existing today, the "consensual" torture rapes in the film will, probably, be even more disqualifying to audience enjoyment than the pervasive incest -- which, often, looks like "consensual" rape as well.)  Nekichi, immediately after returning from the war, is alleged to have had sex with his sister, Uma, the island's chief Noro and his war buddy, Ryu's wife.  But Nekichi has also been poaching fish with dynamite, something that is taboo, and has committed several other infractions as well.  As retribution for his bad acts, the gods have sent a tsunami, as well as a malaria plague.  The tsunami has hefted a huge boulder across a stream or fresh-water spring, thereby, further diminishing the island's water supply.  Nekichi seems to be the scape-goat for all the island's sins (it seems that others, for instance, have been poaching fish with dynamite) and he's blamed for everything that has gone wrong on the island, which is, of course, a lot.  His father, the elder of the Futori clan, accordingly has chained him next to the huge, three-story boulder cast onto the island by the tsunami.  He's supposed to be excavating around the base of the giant rock for the purpose of undermining it and freeing the water supply that it impounds.  Nekichi has been doing this for 20 years, although he seems to have the key to his ankle-chain and spends nights "night-crawling"-- a euphemism for creeping around at night and raping the local girls.  (He also periodically goes out to the atoll's reef and dynamites fish.)  The island's ecology is collapsing and, it seems, everyone is happy to blame Nekichi for these problems -- probably, as a way of avoiding a sense of their own complicity in the environmental calamity.  Because of the Futori clans' crimes, they have also been forbidden to "go to sea" -- that is, they are not allowed to fish or visit the other desert islands nearby.  Into this witch's brew of incest and superstition comes an outsider, Mr. Shimajiri (although he is generally referred to as the "Engineer").  The Engineer is employed by the sugar mill company and he's supposed to survey the island and find water so that the sugar processing can continue.  The Engineer enlists the aid of an earnest young man named Kametano.  Kametano is Nekichi's son and the elder Futori's grandson -- I never figured out who his mother was.  Kametano represents the up-and-coming modernizing young people on the island.  Later, the engineer falls in love with Toriko, the half-retarded Daisie Mae nymphomaniac and has a torrid affair with her.

All of this could be made fairly clear if Imamura had used the Engineer's character as a way to introduce us to the island's denizens.  But Imamura rejects this obvious narrative strategy:  the stranger coming to town and showing us what the people are like in that town when he interacts with them.  Rather, the film begins in media res as it were with melodrama occurring among the Futori clan; the engineer arrives about a half-hour into the 172 minute film.   Indeed, the narrative is often obscured by digressions and hard to follow -- this seems to be an intentional strategy on Imamura's part.  There is a picturesque trip to a nearby bird island led by Nekichi who, despite being chained to the rock, seems generally free to go wherever he wants so long as he doesn't flaunt his freedom.  The Engineer gets a letter in which her wife admits to adultery -- everyone on the island seems to read the letter before it is delivered to the Engineer.  There is a complex plot involving a tract of woods, trees called the Otoki forest that has been preserved because it is taboo.  The Engineer tries to drill a well in the Otoki forest, a task that Nekichi, apparently, sabotages.  Toriko gets pregnant by the Engineer -- her kin try to transport her to the mainland for an abortion but she escapes and swims the gauntlet of sharks back to the island.  Kametano, then, tries to persuade her to jump off the cliff and drown herself in the sea -- this cliff was instrumental in the past as a means of "population control", the island's tenuous resources inadequate if the atoll is too populous.  (There's also a meadow into which everyone had a cram themselves -- those that didn't fit were butchered.)  Toriko refuses to jump off the cliff, although I'm not quite sure what becomes of her.  In a coda to the narrative, five years after the main action, she appears as a ghost.  Ultimately, two strands of the complex narrative collide --  Nechiki dislodges the rock and installs a rice-paddy and the natives of the island perform an elaborate festival called the Dongama celebration:  the festival involves masked oarsmen, much drinking and being beaten with bamboo rods, and huge fetish figures simulating copulation.  Uma, who seems to have lost her gift of prophecy, has sex with the newly liberated Nekichi (or is raped by him -- the level of consent is always problematic) and the two of them flee from Kagura to the Western God's Island, a sort of paradise.  The aggrieved natives, led by the cuckolded Mr. Ryu, don their masks, pursue the lovers, and beat Nekichi to death.  Uma, although left to die tied to the red mask of the sabani (little skiff), becomes a goddess.  Five years later, the entire island has been deforested and reduced to a massive sugar plantation.  Planes now can land on the island and it has been promoted as a tourism destination.  The Engineer returns with his wife.  The island's minstrel, a legless man who sings ballads about Kagura's mythical past, is still pushed around on a cart by one of the women -- but she is now selling icy coca-colas to the tourists embarked on the island.  Kamentano, who participated in the ritualized murder of his own father, Nekichi, has come back to the island to operate a narrow-gage railroad that carries the tourists from the airport to the island's one village.  He sees the ghost of Toriko and, then, a sweeping high-angle shot shows us Uma's skiff sailing into the sunset of the Island of the Western God.

So what is this all about:  it seems pretty clear that, on one level, Imamura is proposing a giant allegory, a sort of Faerie Queen, based on Japanese history and culture.  Imamura makes this clear by starting the picture with an immense image of the red rising sun, sunrise orchestrated with a blast of wailing saxophone and cornet, an infusion of wild bebop jazz -- thereby, combining the ancient with the modern. Shinto mythology proposes that Nippon, the sacred island, was formed by the intercourse of brother and sister kami (or "divinities").  The conversion of Kagura's economy from rice to sugar suggests the depredations of modernity in Japan.  The great rock cast up by the tsunami twenty years before the onset of the movie's narrative seems to suggest World War Two -- a calamity to which the laboring Japanese people are tethered as if by chains.  (The film's soundtrack is raucous with insect and frog noises, weird snatches of bird song, and the ubiquitous clanking of Nekichi's chains).  Island people are incestuous -- they regard themselves as aristocratically isolated from the rest of the world and, therefore, necessarily, and proudly in-bred.  This was Japan's role in the world before the Meiji restoration and the island's disastrous, rapid modernization, a process that left the old Shinto gods largely abandoned except as symbols of a superstitious right-wing patriotism -- you can make the Noro prophecy any way you want.  But the film, of course, is much more than mere allegory and, probably, best read as a commentary on freedom.  People living on a tiny island are not really free and, when they attempt to act autonomously end up committing crimes.  "Only the gods are free," Nekichi says.  "When men try to act like gods they commit crimes for which they must be punished." 

The film's themes relating to freedom are realized photographically by the obstructions that confound our vision -- the wide-screen is always blocked by trees or foliage or the walls of buildings.  Imamura, like many Japanese directors, is enamored with telephoto effects -- the telephoto lens compresses space, cramming everything into the foreground, and making motion toward the camera seem illusory and futile.  The picture is directed with long takes, many of them a minute or more, sequences in which characters occupying a corner of the big, narrow screen interact -- most of the compositions are asymmetrical.  When Ryu torture-rapes Uma, the camera focuses resolutely on a florescent light on which several tiny lizards are crouching motionlessly -- we see Uma's pink flesh out-of-focus writhing below but can't really see what is happening due to the intervening light fixture. (The use of small lizards in the foreground is also characteristics of the film's repeated inserted shots -- the only close-ups in the movie -- of insects, frogs, lizards, and birds.   Editing suggests that the animals are also wide-eyed and watching Kami.  The Futori are said to be "animals" by the rest of the islanders, but they also have a uniquely close relationship to the gods.)

Imamura was given six months to shoot The Profound Desires of the Gods in Okinawa.  The film's footage was not in the can, however, until 18 months had passed.  Nikkatsu Studios, for whom Imamura made this movie, was ultimately bankrupted when the picture failed at the box-office.  It had to retreat into the production of soft-core Roman empire-themed pornography.  Imamura began his career in the early fifties as an assistant to the great Yasujiro Ozu.  Ozu, of course, embodies the serene Zen Buddhist (tea ceremony) aspect of Japanese art.  Imamura is intentionally Ozu's opposite -- "I was interested," he says, "in the relationship of the lower parts of the body to the lower parts of society."  Whereas, Ozu is fundamentally Buddhist in his approach to the world (at least, in his transcendentally calm late films), Imamura embodies Shinto aesthetics, an equally important, but more impenetrable aspect of the Japanese sensibility. 

The Profound Desires of the Gods has been very hard to see.  Although shot in the late sixties, it seems oddly timeless.  I saw  it on video tape 20 years ago and had no idea what the film was about.  The movie is screened at intervals on Turner Classic Movies, generally after midnight -- it is part of the FilmStruck repertoire of pictures sometimes shown on TMC. 

Distant Voices Still Lives

Terence Davies' 1988 Distant Voices Still Lives is an audacious exploration of memory.  Memory is non-narrative, unpredictable, and associative -- and, so, these are the characteristics of Davies' film about his childhood memories of lower middle-class family life in Liverpool in the 1940's and '50's  We construct the past from an unreliable blur of textures, sounds -- often music that recalls memories to us -- a certain cast of light, or the fuzzy edge of familiar shadows, the smell of food or the stink of a particular kind of ordure.  Davies' luxuriates in the palpable, tactile aspects of memory:  his film celebrates water-stained walls, ancient wallpaper,  mildew on walls, masonry crumbling between bricks, dim thresholds and windows with faded, sunbleached curtains, narrow domestic stairways and claustrophobic corridors.  Colors are muted as if seen through layers and layers of unsteady and tremulous thought.  The dysfunctional family that Davies' chronicles in this film poses uneasily in the first ten minutes, obviously missing its central figure, Tommy, the monstrous and psychotic father who we see beating his wife and children in sequences that alternate with his agonizing death by cancer.  It's a relief when the unpredictable and sadistic Tommy is not in the frame -- but his absence is also, in some ways, catastrophic and the film doesn't, necessarily, relish his demise.  The film's audience is coerced into the position of the family members -- they fear and despise their father, but he is fascinating to them:  in one scene, the children climb into a hay-loft to watch their father at peace, curry-combing his pony, and they seem almost as appalled and baffled by his happiness in this brief scene as in they are appalled and terrified by his rage.  When Tommy departs from the picture -- and it is Davies' genius to make him always absent (we see a hearse taking him away about four minutes into the picture), there is something vital missing from the picture and from the lives of the family members: the lethal energy has leached out of their lives and so out of the movie.  Life for these children is either placid boredom or unremitting terror.  Thus, the first 50 minutes of the movie (the so-called "Distant Voices") section focusing on the father's depredations alternates between benumbed terror (the wife and children seem stoic, almost zombies) and rebellion:  the eldest son smashes through a window and threatens to fight the old man; the two older sisters have a network of friends and escape from the domestic nightmare to dances and boyfriends and, ultimately, the other spatial center to the film, the public house which stands as the refuge from home, a convivial, densely crowded space that Davies' usually films as a frieze of people drinking and singing together, lined up on one side of the table like the disciples at the Last Supper, the camera tracking along the men and women smoking and guzzling beer and, almost, always singing pop tunes or old ballads or torch songs.  Davies' compositions are exquisite -- he keeps the camera far enough from the people in his movie to respect their dignity and their suffering, but the images are closely observed:  we seem to be close enough to sense what people are feeling.  Many of the shots read as rigidly posed tableaux or portraits -- these type of images characterize the various ritual sequences that Davies' stages:  weddings, funerals, baptisms.  In these sequences, the characters all face the camera frontally, notwithstanding the actual spatial logic of the events shown (the is particularly evident in the christening scenes in which everyone turns directly to the lens). 

Some critics regard the film as autobiographical and assert that the surrogate for the film maker is the eldest son, Tony.  This is wrong.  Davies' second installment in a chronicle that is essentially about his mother's life is the very great The Long Day Closes, a picture in which the young Terence Davies explicitly appears as the baby of the family, his widowed mother's favorite child, and, like Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a nascent artist always observing the landscapes and people around him so as to forge the aesthetic sensibility that will let him depict these things years later.  Distant Voices Silent Lives is about Davies's father's savagery and its effect on his long-suffering mother and his three older, and much-beloved sibilings, Tony and his big sisters Eunice and Maisie.  (Davies' father died when he was six and there is no stand-in for the little boy in this picture).  In no particular, order the film shows Christmas and Tommy's sentimentality on that holiday, an air raid, the mother singing was she washes an outside window sitting on the ledge, this precarious position metaphorically delineated when her husband beats her savagely in the next scene -- in profile, we see the battered woman mindlessly dusting the top of a table.  The girls court and each of them are married and, then, at last, the son, Tony, who has been in the army also marries.  None of these marriages seem particularly happy and, indeed, they replicate some of the brutal dynamics of the relationship between Tommy and his wife -- although without the beatings.  People turn to the movies and the pub for solace.  Distant Voices Still Lives is fundamentally a musical -- everyone has a vast repertoire of songs that they can sing to console themselves or to cheer up others (there's a wonderful scene of terrified people during an air raid singing "Roll out the Barrel') or, indeed, to comment either directly, or indirectly, on the events occurring around them.  (Davies' sisters combat their wretched father by pretending to be Hollywood debutantes, sporting American accents, and smoking "ciggies' and singing sarcastic show-tunes within his ear-shot.)  People also hide from the misery in their lives by going to the movies and one magisterial sequence shows a tableaux of umbrellas soaked in a driving rain, the camera panning up to movie posters and the wet cornice of the movie palace while the soundtrack plays the orchestral theme to "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing" - the next shot tracks over the heads of an audience crowding the theater, great halos of smoke decorating the air shot through with the projector's light, and, then, picking out the two sisters, now married, weeping as they smoke and watch the screen.  The following shot, however, symbolically, shows the price of this interlude -- two men catapult in slow motion through glass skylights.  These are the women's husbands who have fallen from scaffolding and been seriously injured.  There are more songs in the pubs and at wedding receptions.  Tony weeps desperately before climbing into the limousine that takes him and his bride away.  No one expects happiness in this world -- they just hope to survive.  In the final scenes, we see Davies's mother with her three children walking away from the pub -- it's dark and they vanish into the squalid darkness on the mean streets of Liverpool.  The film resembles, I think, Joyce's Dubliners in many respects -- it's full of barroom songs and arias from light opera and afflicted with a strange sense of stasis, a feeling of paralysis:  everyone yearns to escape and their songs embody that yearning and, yet, no one escapes at all.   I'm ambivalent about this film -- it's structure and peculiar slow camera movements, the way the lens lingers over rising damp and decay, and the movie's resolutely non-narrative scrambling of time and events is a bit daunting.  The film is never dull but it is certainly bafflingly hermetic -- you need to listen to the commentary by Davies' to understand exactly what he is showing you in some scenes.  It's beautiful, moving, but, also, airless in a way, a private epistle from Davies and directed to Davies alone.  But this is on first viewing of a film that is constructed like no other -- except, perhaps, the later and even more non-narrative The Long Day Closes -- and I believe that further watching will probably bring me to a better appreciation of the movie:  it can not be understood on first viewing and I couldn't tell exactly what was happening until the second time I saw the picture.       

The Devil Doll

Tod Browning made The Devil Doll, a horror film, in 1936.  The movie starts with great aplomb and seems headed for something wonderful, but, then, the picture stalls out perversely -- the last two-thirds of the movie are literally soporific.  I defy anyone to sit through them without falling asleep.  Indeed, the movie is so oddly boring that you fall asleep without any warning -- blinking your eyes is dangerous because there is a distinct possibility you will not reopen those eyes once you have shut them for even an instant.  I tried to watch the last two-thirds of the movie three different times and, on each occasion, found myself asleep until a penultimate scene involving an explosion woke me up.  I didn't really feel all that tired and, so, I must attribute my somnolence to some weird and occult effect of this film:  it is some kind of elixir of sleep. 

Because I have never seen the middle forty-five minutes of the movie, it's questionable whether I can comment on the film.  But since I assume the movie's narcoleptic effect will be universal -- that is, that no one will ever remain awake to see the middle section of the film, I will make some remarks about the part of the picture that you, my dear readers, are likely to see before slumber overtakes you.  Tod Browning was a great, visual director who honed his skills in the silent era and, therefore, when he is working entirely with images, he is splendidly economical and effective.  Once his films get under way, however, they succumb to the truly idiotic narratives that he always seems to be adapting.  At the start of The Devil Doll, we see a flash of light shot directly into the camera lens and blinding us.  There is a sharp cut to a reverse shot showing some dark brush illumined by a searchlight and, off-screen, someone says that "the two escaped convicts" have come this way.  Cut to low shot of boots sloshing through dark, murky water and a bloodhound pulling at a leash.  The next shot shows two men, presumably the escaped convicts -- one of them (played by Henry B. Walthall) says that he has spent 17 years yearning to complete his experiments; the other convict says that the dogs have lost their scent and that he will wreak revenge on the men who framed him to 17 years on Devil's Island.  (The confident convict is played by Lionel Barrymore).  This opening sequence is a marvel of atmosphere and ultra-fast and efficient narration -- It makes Robert Bresson's mise-en-scene seem positively over wrought.  The next ten minutes is equally great.  The two protagonists reach a laboratory where the haggard scientist's wife, a wild-eyed maenad who limps about on a crutch and looks like Marie Curie, is engaged in experiments to shrink animals and people to one-sixth their size.  The shrunken creatures are torpid and inert until someone "transfixes them with the power of their will" -- then, the little beasties spring into action.  Walthall was famous for his role as the "Little Colonel" in Griffith's Birth of a Nation, but here, twenty years later, he looks very sick and old -- in fact, he was dying of some kind intestinal cancer.  (He matches his wife's wild-eyes and has a prophetic look, a bit like Frank Lloyd Wright.)  The mad scientist dies after vowing "to make things small!"  Lionel Barrymore, then, departs with the mad scientist's equally crazy wife -- they go to Paris where he engages in an elaborate and boring scheme to kill the men who embezzled money from his bank and, then, accused him of robbing the place and murdering the night watchman.   (Barrymore plays the part of the revenging villain in drag -- he acts the role of an old woman, a device that derives from Tod Browning's work with Lon Chaney in the silent film, The Unholy Three.) This part of the movie is turgid, doesn't make any sense -- although I was asleep for most of these scenes -- and ends with fiery death of the mad scientist's widow (she is pursuing her crazy dream of making everyone one-sixth their normal size) and the happy engagement of the maligned banker's daughter to a feisty and brave taxi driver.  This last scene takes place on the Eifel Tower.  Watch the movie's first 15 minutes and it's last five -- you won't have any choice anyway.  The film's talky middle part will simply put you to sleep even if you wish to resist the temptation of slumber.

Simon of the Desert

Simon of the Desert is a short film by Luis Bunuel made in 1965 and shot by the wonderful Mexican cinematographer, Gabriel Figuero.  The movie's short running time, a mere 40 minutes, is explained by the fact that the film was originally designed to be part of an anthology with two other sections.  The anthology didn't get finished and so Bunuel's contribution was, in effect, orphaned -- the movie was not easy to see for many years, primarily because it was too short to stand alone as a feature film and too long for a short subject.  The movie is restrained and enigmatic:  I've seen it several times and don't know exactly what Bunuel means by the film.  Of course, the Spanish director is a surrealist and, I suppose, he would have disclaimed any meaning at all, preferring to regard the film as a sort of open-ended and puzzling comedy.  Simon is Simon Stylites, a saint that we first meet climbing down from a pillar where he has stood with outstretched arms for several years.  A wealthy man in the neighborhood has decided to show-off by building a taller, more ornate column on which the saint can stand.  A number of half-witted monks stand around the base of the pillar -- periodically, they bicker about theology.  A thief who has had his hands cut off in retribution for his crimes is the beneficiary of a miracle -- Simon restores his hands.  (Of course, we can anticipate what will happen next -- the criminal's daughter questions her father whether these are the same hands that he possessed before they were chopped-off and he cuffs her on the ear for her impudence.)  Simon realizes that standing on the pillar is too easy a penance for him and, so, he decides to further mortify himself by standing on one foot.  Satan, in the form of a little girl who looks a bit like Brigitte Bardot, tempts him.  When Simon tells the devil to get away from him, lightning strikes and the girl is revealed to be a haggard and gaunt old lady with sagging jowls and fearsome eyes.  A dwarf tends to his sheep and a young monk who praises Simon skips around the desert like a teenage maiden in a movie by D.W. Griffith.  One monk accuses Simon of over-eating and has a seizure.  Satan appears again, this time as a half-naked woman in a weird self-propelled casket -- it wriggles over the desert like an snake or iguana.  Satan gets up on the pillar with the Saint and cuddles with him.  A plane appears and we next see the Saint in New York City sitting in a rock and roll club with the young woman who is also Satan.  A band plays some aggressive and wild-sounding dance music.  Simon asks for the name of the dance and Satan tells him that is "Radioactive Flesh."  He wants to get back to the desert but has lost his way.

Simon is not much of saint -- he's really more a self-mortifying masochistic eccentric.  It's not clear whether he's just a contrarian or an idiot.  At the rock club, he is dressed like a European existentialist -- he wears a black turtle neck and smokes a pipe morosely.  Clearly, he's not configured for joi d'vivre.  (The only thing he likes doing is blessing people and animals and things -- at one point, he works a piece of meat stuck between his teeth out of his mouth and is about to bless the fragment of food before changing his mind and flicking it away.  Bunuel's point, I suppose, is that sainthood is much overrated.  Our modern saints are gloomy existentialists frequenting joints where loud music is played.  The movie is shot with absolute objectivity.  Figuero poses Simon against the sky in commanding, if futile, postures.  A vast stony desert extends to barren mountains.  New York is all canyons of dark brick and sooty metal.  Oddly enough, the rock and roll music at the end is excellent -- it's a savage instrumental piece that makes the dancers lunge about moronically; the music sounds a little like the uncompromising and thunderous instrumentals by Link Wray.  The bitter joke is that it doesn't take a whole lot of temptation for the Saint to completely lose his way.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) is an oddity among American films, an anthology picture comprised of six separate and, indeed, very different tales, all of them set in the American West.  The film is extremely entertaining -- the stories are all interesting, narratively concise, both well-acted and well-performed.  It is a tribute to the overall excellence of the project that every review of the film that I have read names a different segment or story in the anthology as the best in the group.  It seems, accordingly, that there is literally something for everyone in this picture and that different viewers will judge the stories, apparently, according to their own distinct esthetics and interests.  The movie begins with the shot of an old, dog-eared book, a Victorian-era anthology of short stories set in the American West.  A hand turns the page to a color illustration, an engraving that is protected behind a film of onion paper -- the illustrations, generally, show bizarre scenes that seem highly incongruous with a fragment of dialogue or narration in italics at the foot of the picture.  We wonder how this strange image can possibly be relevant to a story set in the American West.  The story follows, always ending with a shot of the last page of the tale, sometimes supplying useful additional information (if you can read quickly enough) and sometimes merely depicting something that we have already seen.  The hand, then, turns the page to the next illustration and, then, the next of the six stories begins.  The movie is unified by its splendid photography and the weird argot spoken by the characters -- everyone talks as if the characters were in Charles Portis' famous novel True Grit:  the speeches are elaborate, florid, and feature exotic words and circumlocutions that are sometimes hard to understand.  (The last tale involves bounty hunters, although I didn't understand that "harvesting" meant killing people for the rewards on their head.  In one tale, a young girl uses the word "apothegm".)  Everyone is wildly loquacious and people express themselves with baroque turns of phrase and elegant courtly, almost medieval, honorifics.  The fantastical quality of the diction and speeches, all of them remarkably gracious and, even, self-abasing -- people seem polite to a fault -- contrasts markedly with the extreme and bloody violence shown in about half of the tales:  people sing little arias to their counterparts showing the most exquisite etiquette before shooting or clubbing them to death or engaging in lynchings, murder, and other mayhem.

The film that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs most resembles is Kurosawa's Dreams .  There is an exotic, off-kilter and, even, surreal aspect to all of the stories.  Although the film features spectacular location-sequences and flawless historical recreations of such things as Indian attacks and wagon trains, the viewer senses something theatrical and dream-like in the narratives -- ordinary logic doesn't apply and there is a weird, almost Elizabethan formality about the way that people speak and the fates that they befall.  Many Coen brothers films are very, very dark and their jaunty aura of insouciance conceals a profound melancholy -- a strain of fatalistic despair underlies films like Inside Llewellyn Davis and the autobiographical A Serious Man.  People are wicked, selfish, and cruel -- the good are snuffed-out but this is fate is general:  no one gets out alive or unscathed.  Everyone is subject to a common, absurd or, even,  comically ridiculous doom.  As The Ballad progresses, the stories get more and more serious -- there are fewer jokes and allusions:  in the end of the film proceeds in deadly earnest.  But the subject matter keeps the audience entertained:  The Ballad of Buster Scruggs delivers all of the pleasures of the classic Western -- there are horse chases, battles with savage Indians, shoot-outs on Main Street at high noon, singing cowboys, stagecoach rides across barren terrain, and, of course, spectacular landscapes and nature photography.  But these elements act in service to a gloomy, nihilistic vision of the Old West as a place filled with random sudden death, wild Indians, and vicious brigands.

These themes are dramatized most efficiently in the opening tale, the eponymous Ballad of Buster Scruggs.  Scruggs is a singing cowboy, first presented two us crossing the enormous iconic desert at Monument Valley.  He's also a psychopathic killer who guns down anyone who crosses his path.  In a bar fight, he contrives a way to have a bad hombre shoot himself three times in the face -- then, he improvises a merry little ballad about a bad guy who had his face shot-off.  The saloon girls and gamblers all do a little jig to the tune.  But, of course, the fastest gun in the West is catnip to other killers and, sooner as opposed to later, someone rides into town who is even faster on the draw.  Scruggs is gunned down and, in a remarkable sequence, his soul, wearing little white wings soars up over the wilderness and the tiny Western village.  Scruggs is equipped with lyre and he sings and plays as he rises to heaven.  (This sequence seems a counterpoint to the last episode in the narrative that seems to be set in Sartre's version of Hell -- "other people" bickering and trapped on a spectral stagecoach that seems bound for perdition.)   "Near Algodones" involves a hapless bank robber played by James Franco -- he robs a little false-front bank set up in the absolute middle of nowhere, encounters a wild-eyed and indefatigably obstinate teller and, ultimately ends up getting lynched not once but twice. He sees a pretty girl smiling up at him from beneath the scaffold, comments "pretty girl" and, then, the screen goes black because the hood has been tugged over his eyes and the trap dropped much to the amusement of the crowd gathered for the hanging.  "The Meal Ticket" is ineffably weird -- the story of a scowling showman who drags a man without arms or legs through the snowy
Rocky Mountains.  The young man recites poetry -- he is called "the Wingless Thrush."  This section is so palpably cold and icy and you feel the sleet and frost coming off your TV set.  The story of the "Wingless Thrush" features a fantastic performance by the human oddity -- he pouts like a girl and has the features of Pre-Raphaelite maiden.  But interest in his recitations from Shakespeare and Byron palls and, in the end, his keeper (Liam Neeson) blithely replaces him with another sideshow act that is easier to keep and maintain.  In "All Gold Canyon" (derived from a Jack London story), an old prospector wanders into an incredibly lush and beautiful mountain valley.  He finds some nuggets of gold, digs dozens of pits in a verdant meadow, and, finally, discovers a rich vein of ore.  (He calls the vein of ore "Mr. Pocket.")   But a claim jumper ambushes him, guns the old man down in his pit, and, then, tries to seize the gold.  The old man revives, kills the claim-jumper, and departs from the valley lugging his sack of gold -- a stag returns to drink from the beautiful mountain stream and butterflies play among the flowers and a big owl views the whole episode with baleful eye.  "The Gal who got rattled" is also based on a short story written during the time of Teddy Roosevelt.  The tale involves a young woman who sets off with wagon train headed for the Willamette Valley in Oregon.  Her brother, who has induced her to leave the East, dies suddenly from cholera, but the girl continues West and her fortunes, it seems, improve markedly when the trail boss proposes marriage to her.  But she wanders away from the wagon train to chase her dog, a terrier called "President Pierce" and ends up in the middle of an Indian attack.  The fight with the Comanches in this section is one of the greatest "last stand" type battles ever filmed and the episode is a classic -- it is both genuinely terrifying and shocking as well.  The final sequence, called "The Mortal Remains" involves people on a hell-bound stage bickering about virtue and sin, all in the setting of imminent and ghastly death.  The film has a great soundtrack, many fine Western ballads and tunes, including everyone's all-time favor "Cool Water."  The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, now available on Netflix, is one of the best films of the year and highly recommended.

 

Sunken Cities (Exhibit at Minneapolis Institute of Art)

Sunken Cities is an exhibition of Egyptian artifacts, some of them retrieved from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.  The objects on display were made relatively late in the enormous span of history encompassing civilization in Egypt.  Most of these things, generally religious statuary and votive offerings, were produced between about 600 BCE and 200 CE.  Thus, much of this material may be attributed to the Ptolmaic period -- that is, a time when Egyptian culture was subject to Hellenizing (and Roman) influences.  The show's gimmick is that brave French archaeologists diving off the sea-coast comprised by the Nile delta discovered two lost cities, drowned beneath Mediterranean sea -- the frisson, as it were, advertised by the exhibition's title is that of bold adventure and discovery, the exoticism surrounding deep sea or high-mountain or deep jungle excavations that accompanies an Indiana Jones movie.  (This is the appeal that the formidable and ubiquitous Zahi Hawass, the big boss of Egyptian archaeology with his trademark broad-brimmed hats and handsome piratical features, brings to innumerable TV shows about lost mummies, pyramids, and secret tombs in the Valley of the Kings.)  This appeal is questionable in my mind -- it confuses archaeology with mere looting, the excitement of finding some wonderful object in a lagoon or desert and, then, without regard for context, seizing the thing and bringing it back to a museum to be contemplated by a sensation-seeking public.  In fact, real archaeological research is intensely dependent on context and involves a lot more cataloguing of pottery shards than the excavation of spectacular golden masks and monuments.

In fact, as it turns out, Sunken Cities is a misnomer.  After a couple of galleries featuring images of divers and murky undersea photographs blown up to mural size, the show settles into its real, and fascinating, theme -- an exploration of religious rites relating the murder, dismemberment, and resurrection of the Egyptian vegetation God, Osiris.  The two lost cities turn out to be Thonis-Heraclieon and, across a two-mile causeway, Canopis.  (Thonis is the Egyptian name for a Nile delta port known to the Greeks as Heraclieon.)   Two large statues of Egyptians pharaohs were found in the silt at Thonis -- they are about 35 feet tall and shown in the museum lobby.  A variety of other objects dragged from the sea are shown in the exhibit, most of them quite small, including small bronze figures, votives, and jewelry apparently donated to Osiris at a large temple to his cult now submerged beneath the sea.  The first two galleries are painted with blue walls to simulate the sea and bubbling water plays from hidden speakers, seemingly an attempt to make visitors feel that they are swimming in forty feet of water and digging in the silt.  Egyptian antiquities are stiff and impersonal and their general aura of imperturbable, stylistic certainty (the exact opposite of the anxieties that post-renaissance art dramatizes) are, for me, a little abstract and off-putting.  But in the first room, I saw a stucco shard marked indelibly with a beautifully outlined ram and, then, a jovial plaque of Bes, the Egyptian god used to scare away demons and ghosts and repel the evil-eye and these artifacts had a real presence -- you could feel the artist's hand working in the wonderfully assured sketch of the ram and Bes had a wacky nonchalance, grotesque, witty, like a cartoon superhero.  These objects intrigued me and, as the real theme of the show emerged, I discovered that, in fact (and to my surprise), the exhibit was genuinely fascinating.  About  70% of the objects on show are loaned from museums in Cairo or Alexandria and, in fact, weren't pulled from the sea at the sister cities of Canopis and Thonis.  These objects are generally images, charms, and religious statues (the Old Testament calls them "idols") relating  to the veneration of Osiris.  There are two splendid figures of Osiris and, his sister, Isis in the show -- carved from beautifully polished graywracke stone.  Similarly, an idol of Tawaret, a destructive goddess of water and chaos, is so exquisitely preserved that it looks like it was made yesterday -- in fact, the four-foot tall idol has the zany exuberance of a sculpture of Jeff Koons:  it's a fat, pregnant hippo standing on her hind legs and grinning through the toothy head of a crocodile.  In the festival month of Khoniak, the birth of Osiris is celebrated -- images show him sitting on the lap of his sister Isis and, in fact, being suckled by her.  (The God is just a smaller version of his fully grown mature self).  During Khoniak, the priests in Thonis made small mummies of Osiris, doughy figures bound in bandages with protruding erections -- this is Osiris vegetans,  a miniature mummy with a hard-on made from clay mixed with grain and seed.  These mummies were sealed in little cases and, then, set afloat -- some of the boats are equipped with seven falcon candleholders so that the small ceremonial vessel would be illuminated when it was wafted out to sea on the tide, the so-called "Great Navigation" which is one of the concluding rites of Khoniak.  Osiris was ripped to shreds, reassembled by his sister, and his body, then, resurrected -- this life-story staged and re-staged by priests as a guarantor the annual life-giving flooding on the Nile.  Later, Osiris was synthesized with Zeus and became Serapis, a furry-looking Herculean deity, great and bearded like Poseidon.  Sometimes, Osiris appeared in his avatar as a sacred bull, Apis -- and there is a spectacular life-size sculpture of a bull in the show.  As time progressed, the art becomes more Hellenic in character although it never loses its stiff,  formal and hieratic Egyptian aspect.  At the end the show, as a valedictory image, we see an almost life-sized statue of a priest of Osiris, the man characterized in a portrait like those favored by the Romans, a real flesh and flood human being -- the priest clutches to his chest a great canopic jar showing Osiris with his uraeus  (rearing twin cobras, also an emblem of the Egyptian pharaohs).  It's a wonderful work of art, combining the particularizing tendencies of Roman portraiture with the stiff, abstract, and impersonal art of the Egyptians and a fine l'envoi to a show that I highly recommend. 

Silent Night (Minnesota Opera -- November 17, 2018)

I attended the world premiere of the opera Silent Night commissioned and first performed by the Minnesota Opera Company in 2011.  The opera was disappointing to me and I didn't like it very much.  (I was particularly incensed, I recall, by the vaguely atonal texture of the music -- it seems, at once, perverse and perversely difficult to write a Christmas opera without a whiff of the carols that so much characterize the Season.  Misguided artistic purity, I think, boxed the composer Mark Puts into writing in the style of late Stravinsky or Benjamin Britten as his most acerbic and, as a consequence, no one emerges from the production whistling any of its tunes -- or, indeed, even remembering much about the music at all.)  Apparently, I was in the distinct minority with respect to my disdain for the show -- the opera won a Pulitzer Prize and has been performed eight or nine times since its inception, mostly in the US and Canada.   Silent Night was revived this Fall by the Minnesota Opera Company, perhaps in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, the subject of the libretto.  At the end of the first Act, I was puzzled -- the show seemed much, much better than I remembered and, perhaps, my initial impressions had been callow or mistaken.  At intermission, I was baffled.  But by the end of the opera, my initial impressions were confirmed -- Silent Night has a completely disastrous second Act.  In fact, if the show were to end with some sort of brief coda after the first Act, I think I would largely regard the opera as a success -- it's the last forty-five minutes that kills the production.

Silent Night chronicles the famous and improvised Christmas truce on parts of the Western Front in December 1914 (the opera adapts a French dramatic film on the subject Joyeaux Noel, a movie that I have not seen.)  The libretto follows the fortunes of a German Heldentenor and a Norwegian soprano who we see in the first scene warbling out a Mozart-like duet (the composer is very good with pastiches of other, earlier composers).  The proceedings on-stage are interrupted by a German officer who fiercely reads a news report of declaration of war.  In Scotland, two young brothers enlist to partake in "the glory of the war."  In France, a young married man leaves his sad new bride (she's pregnant) to go to the Western Front.  There's an eight minute montage of fighting -- mostly somewhat absurd (this kind of thing is difficult to do on-stage) -- and, then, we see the main characters ensconced in trenches so close to one another that they can hear alarm clocks sounding on the other side of no-man's land.  It's Christmas and everyone is completely miserable.  The German tenor is ordered to the rear to perform a concert for the war-mongering Kronprinz -- fortunately, for the music, he encounters his former mistress, the sad Norwegian soprano.  (The obviously problem here is to find a way to incorporate high voices into the opera's vocal register -- Britten would have just used countertenors like Peter Pears; Puts and his librettist have to find a way to get a woman to the trenches  -- thus, the subplot involving the German tenor and the Norwegian soprano.)  There's a beautiful pastiche song -- again a bit like Mozart or Rossini at his most melodious -- complicated by the fact that the tenor is shell-shocked and prone to wild, discordant mood-swings.  The second pastiche is good enough that the audience on the night that I saw the show gave it an ovation, starved, I think, for something conventionally melodic.  At the Front, the Scotsmen have received a bagpipe.  One of the soldiers plays the bagpipe much to the derision of the German troops who mock the sound of the instrument.  A Scottish officer sings a pastiche folk-song, also an effective number, and this leads the Germans to sing along.  Gradually, the joshing across the battle-lines becomes warmer and more friendly.  The tenor, who has arrived on the battlefield with the soprano, leaps out of his trench and stands between the opposing armies.  This leads to the French and Scotsman agreeing to a truce that will end at midnight.  This is the climax of the opera and, by far, its most satisfying scene -- the camaraderie between the troops is genuinely moving and the slow transition from hate to nasty joking to more gentle humor and, then, something approaching friendship is effectively, and realistically, done.  This isn't a kumbaya moment -- intercut, as it were, with the celebrations are short brutal interludes where the Scottish youth, whose brother has been shot down by the Germans, swears murderous vengeance.  There are several effective, muscular male choruses and the music portrays the reluctant rapprochement between the armies.  But, things start to go a bit sour when the Scottish priest celebrates mass and, then, the soprano sings some kind of wordless threnody, a sort of very high-pitched and, even, unpleasantly screechy lament.  Why wouldn't someone just sing a Christmas carol?  Why does Puts feel he has to invent austere, very cold and cerebral church music for this scene?  (It's invidious to Silent Night to imagine what Ives would have done here -- a cacophony of familiar carols and hymns all mixed together and sung in different keys with a thudding undertone to simulate the big guns and, then, remote, half-heard choruses wafted here and there on the breeze -- alas, there is none of this in the opera:  instead Puts just illustrates the action; he's writing a sophisticated version of movie music -- it's all unimaginatively and literally illustrative.)  Nonetheless, at the half-time, I was pleased with the opera -- I thought that it showed vaunting, almost excessive ambition, used a large cast, and was ingeniously staged.  Furthermore, the climactic truce scene was intensely moving.

But there's another forty-five minutes to go and what follows is unreservedly bad.  The field commanders reprise their suspicions of one another's motive in a way that feels simply repetitive.  Then, everyone agrees to a truce to bury the dead.  This is actually dramatized and, of course, it simply doesn't work.  (In the opera, needless to say, the dead are very well-preserved and not fragmentary -- they look like people sleeping.  But, nonetheless, the whole concept is grotesque and the staging verges on the risible, particularly when the Norwegian singer, still hanging around the gruesome battlefield, participates in collecting the corpses and sings about it.  (A more imaginative and less literal-minded composer would have used a sardonic danse macabre for these scenes -- but, no such luck here.)  The generals rage in three different languages -- the opera is staged in German, English (Scottish in fact) and French.  They shout imprecations in a cacophonous trio.  Then, Scottish are shipped off to another part of the front.  The French are withdrawn from the line of battle and sent to Verdun -- this is supposed to be bitterly ironic.  The Germans are loaded into sinister-looking freight cars and sent to the Eastern Front.  (The librettist seems to think the Eastern Front in World War One had the same lethal connotations as in the Second World War  -- in fact, the Germans were able to win most battles in on the Eastern Front in the Great War and the assignment of the troops to that place seems almost benign.)  More heavy irony clouds the last Act -- the German field commander is Jewish and, as he extols his patriotism and the Fatherland, the German Kronprinz, suggests that he's not even really a "true German."  This is all staged against a backdrop of railroad cars.  Some critics claim that a great composer like Shostakovich can write music that is "ironic."  I'm agnostic a to whether this is true.  But Puts can't write "ironic" music and so the atonal, jagged and wide interval-jumping music in the last part of the opera doesn't really work on any level.  The Norwegian Soprano and the Heldentenor cross No-Man's Land, taking advantage of some remaining comity between the armies -- they surrender to the French who note that they have come to the right army for l'amour.  (I doubt very much that the soprano and tenor are going to be sent to same prison camp.  Therefore, we can't really see their escape to the French lines as a happy-ending -- at best, it's problematic and neutral.)  Most baffling, the last half of the second Act just concerns itself with the mechanics of getting all of its players off-stage.  Once the plot has succeeded in getting all the singers and all the mud-daubed male choruses exiled from the battlefield, there's literally nothing to do but bring things to a wholly puzzling close.  The Western front now is deserted -- a spotlight picks out the grave of the Scottish brother slain in action and the music skids into a dying fall, twenty-or-so inconsequential bars before the curtain comes down.  This is the most diminished, self-effacing, and non-dramatic ending that I have ever seen attempted in any opera -- just get everyone off-stage and, when the singers and choruses are all gone, drop the curtain.  The audience doesn't seem much inclined to applaud -- what are we applauding?:  everyone being hauled away leaving us to behold an empty stage.  It doesn't work and, in fact, the last five minutes are flat-out weird and emotionally confusing -- there's no one on which to affix our emotions, no one with whom to identify and the music doesn't really suffice to hold our attention. 

I don't like the opera.  However, the production was effective.  The Heldentenor was a little growly in his lower register, but when his voice rang out mid- and upper-range, the sound was brazen, like a trumpet of the apocalypse, a tonal allusion to the man's incipient shell-shock and madness.  The set consisted of a ravaged church overlooking a sort of inclined ramp tilting upward and comprised of sand-bag ramparts -- this scenery or, better stated, stage machinery was mounted so that it could be rotated.  The back of the Church doubled as a bunker in the front-lines.  Stagehands dressed as soldiers of the great war pushed the inclined ramp in circles -- it was laden with genteel-looking corpses.  Rear projections depicted images from battlefields in the Great War and a single stark tree stood in accusatory way in the center of the stage. 

Billy Dankert and the High-Meds

When I was a young man, I spent a lot of time listening to music in taverns in Austin, Minnesota, the place where I went to practice law.  Austin had a vibrant music scene:  a symphony orchestra, High school choruses and glee club groups that were known throughout the State and a large coterie of exceptional bar-band musicians.  It's cheap to live in Austin and you could almost make a living playing every weekend in the taverns in town or located between Mason City, Iowa and the south Twin Cities suburbs.  Ordinarily, there was no cover charge and the beer was very cheap and, if you came a few minutes before the music began (usually about 8:00 pm), you could stake out a comfortable place with elbow room, close, but not to close to the stage and the dance-floor, a seat with good sight-lines and ready access to the toilets and where the waitresses could reach you easily enough for re-fills.  Some of the country-western and blue-grass bands played mostly covers, but, just about every group had a charismatic lead singer-songwriter who wrote originals, many of them very good and, in fact, popular with the crowd.  You don't know these songs because they never established themselves outside Austin or beyond the limits of a few counties -- but they were good tunes, rousing, and the anthems of my youth.  I stopped listening to live music in bars about thirty years ago -- in the Twin Cities, the cover charges were exorbitant, but, more importantly, you paid a lot of pocket money to stand in a dark corner of a dark room filled to fire-hazard with other sweaty people and couldn't see the band, couldn't hear either, and, of course, had no chance at all when it came to buying a beer.  Shows like that were endurance tests -- uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and frightening -- and, so, after a while, I dropped out of the listening game.  Later, when my step-daughter Sena Ehrhardt had a successful career as a Blues singer, I returned to clubs to hear her play -- but, in many instances, the milieu was unpleasant:  too hot, too crowded, sitting somewhere way too far from the bar or the band.  Worse, I thought, were the festivals -- for instance, the Blues Festival in Duluth:  for me, those affairs were an ante-room to hell:  enforced proximity with grizzled Biker wannabes and their tattooed molls, elbow-to-elbow crowds around the stage in inclement weather (either terrific suffocating heat or deadly sunshine or mud and cold rain), noisome porta-potties and vastly overpriced beer and food always accessible only at the end of a long smelly line of fans.  The speakers boomed, but the sound quality was low -- it was like listening to music over a telephone. 

On November 10, 2018, I ventured out to the Austin VFW to hear Billy Dankert and his four member band, the High-Meds perform.  Jim (Billy) Dankert is the drummer of the Gear Daddies, the most successful of the Austin home-grown bands, and he wrote several of that group's signature songs.  Dankert also is a fine graphic artist, an excellent cerebral painter, and he fronts a band comprised mostly of men from Austin with whom he graduated from High School in the mid-eighties.  (Dankert has released a number of solo albums that are also well worth acquiring.)  The show at the VFW was a benefit and it reminded me forcefully of the good old days -- the place wasn't overly crowded and the music was both relaxed and superb.  The waitress was accommodating and there was no problem keeping a full beer in front of me on a table with a good view of the stage and musicians.  Dankert's band has a ferocious attack and his songs are unpretentious, hard-rocking, and short -- most of them seemed to be to be about three minutes long.  This is garage-band music elevated to art:  Dankert's tunes are have infectious riffs and are carefully constructed.  They seem built to last.  (I once talked to a friend who was learning piano by playing songs by Joanie Mitchell -- my friend showed me the chord structures and how the melody was founded in that inexorable progression of chords and said that the songs "were built like a brick shit-house", meaning that as a compliment, of course.  Dankert's songs seem similar -- they have a rotary motion like a turbine engine and the things spin swiftly, efficiently, and produce a wall of sound.)  There isn't any unnecessary grandstanding -- no guitar-hero solos or extravagant interludes:  the song begans, it rocks hard for three minutes, then, it's over.  Dankert barks out a brusque "Thanks" to the applause and, then, tears into the next tune.  The covers are equally adept, economical, and cut close to the bone.  At least, one of them was a little perverse, a pounding version of "All I want is a room somewhere" from the musical My Fair Lady.  It sounds improbable but the song was excellent.  Dankert is not a prolific song-writer -- he told me that he works slowly and there is obviously an enormous amount of craft invested in this labor.   After all, he's spent a lot of his life working in these vineyards.  The band features bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and a lead guitar with a drummer (too loud for the room on the night that I saw the band).  Adding to the powerful "wall of sound" effect are the keyboards -- on the night that I saw the band, one of the musicians played organ with an enthusiastic flourish.  Dankert has a good rock-n-roll voice -- he has a high tenor that spikes through the band's roar.  (In the lower range, the mix at the VFW made him harder to hear.)  It wasn't a flawless show but, then, who wants flawlessness in live music -- you come for the imperfect experience in the moment, the irreproducible event on that special night in that special place.  Seeing this show reminds me that I've amputated a part of myself by not attending more to live music and that I should go out more.   

Bohemian Rhapsody

It's one of the oldest stories in movies:  a plucky young man, the son of immigrants, defies his parents to become a pop music star.  Along the way, he wins fame and fortune, but loses his moral compass.  In the end, the hero is jarred into recognition that he has strayed from "right thoughts, right words, right deeds" as it is expressed in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018).  He finds a way of making popular music that doesn't offend the morality of his traditional parents, re-connects with those once vital to him, and finds redemption.  This describes the plot of the new bio-pic about the lead singer of Queen, Freddie (previously Farouk) Mercury; my summary also describes innumerable other films of this kind, including one of the progenitors of the form in American movies, Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer.  The only deviation from this time-honored story is sexual:  Freddie Mercury is gay, although it takes him one-third of the movie to recognize this fact and his moral crisis is precipitated by the imminence of his death by AIDS. 

Andy Warhol said, and I am always quoting this important proposition, that all Cokes are alike and all Cokes are good.  The same truism applies to movies of this sort, whether Coal Miner's Daughter or La Bamba or The Jazz Singer in its various iterations.  The form almost always pleases although, of course, one might wish for something a little more novel or, indeed, flamboyant when it comes to Bohemian Rhapsody -- Freddie Mercury had a great, perverse sense of style and he was a gay icon before such things could be unambiguouslyrepresented (one of his MTV music videos went too far with cross-dressing and gay imagery and was banned) and, accordingly, one might expect the film about his life to be extravagant, adventurous, even, perhaps, a bit experimental:  the subject matter cries out for direction by Baz Luhrmann or, perhaps, Paolo Sorrentino.  But, in fact, Bohemian Rhapsody is conservative, even a little slow-paced, and it feels somewhat perfunctory -- it dutifully pushes all the buttons and most people will tear up once or twice during the film, but there's nothing extraordinary about the way the picture is directed or designed.  There are some excellent musical sequences, some great, if archaic-looking, montages, and lots of depravity (although the film is PG and doesn't really show anything you couldn't expose an intelligent nine-year old to.)  One of the pleasures of the genre is that it can display the moral debasement of the pleasure-seeking folks in show business while at the same time asking us to pronounce judgement on their antics -- we get our cake and can eat it too.  Here there are lots of scenes of hunky-looking lads in leather cavorting in gay bars and casting yearning gazes at one another -- at one point, when Freddy is lonely during a tour of the United States, he looks lustfully at truck driver who looks lustfully back at him; this sequence occurs while Freddy is talking to his cute blonde wife -- the impression we get is that if she had been with him to satisfy his sexual urges, Freddy wouldn't have become gay and, therefore, wouldn't have acquired his mortal illness.  Later, the film is a little less primitive in its sexual attitudes -- ultimately, Freddy confesses to his wife that he is "bisexual" although for the second half of the movie his lovers are all, without exception, men. 

I never much liked Queen.  "Bohemian Rhapsody" always struck me as a shallow and derivative rip-off of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band and some of the group's biggest hits have a manipulative, even quasi-fascist buzz about them, particularly "We are the Champions" and "We will rock you" -- both tunes that would not seem out of place at a Trump Rally.  But I enjoyed the musical numbers in the movie and, in fact, liked the songs better in the film than I ever liked them on the radio.  And there are some things about the film that are informative -- Freddy Mercury's famous over-bite was caused by the fact that he had four upper incisors instead of just two; his parents were Zoroastrian Farsi's, displaced Persians who came to England via Zanzibar.  This explains the curious reference in one of Mercury's songs to Allah -- "Bismallah" (if God wills).  Throughout the movie everyone refers to Mercury as a "Paki" although, of course, he is no such thing, but, perhaps, the use of the Muslim expression "Bismallah" was intended as a taunt to British racists who mischaracterized the young man.  The final half-hour of the film involves Mercury's decision to return to his band (he has abandoned them) and perform at Bob Geldorf's "Live Aid" concert in the mid-eighties.  This seems pretty inconsequential but the film does a good job making the negotiations with disgruntled Queen band members preparatory to the Live Aid show fairly suspenseful -- this is really the only narrative suspense in the movie.  Everything else follows the traditional pattern for music bio-pics of this sort.  The final concert sequences are rousing, although there are far too many intrusive reaction shots inserted in the film to signal how we should respond.  Although Queen was often pretentious in the manner of Pink Floyd and the late Beatles, I think they were best when performing their simplest material -- no one will persuade me that "Fat-Bottomed Girls" isn't their best tune and, indeed, one of the greatest rock 'n roll songs of all time. 

The Hitch-Hiker

In The Sons of the Desert, Laurel and Hardy suffer awful punishment when they lie to their wives about a trip that they have planned.  Something similar befalls Gilbert and Roy, the hapless victims of a spree-killing hitchhiker, in Ida Lupino's 1953 The Hitch-Hiker.  Gilbert and Roy have told their wives that they are going fishing in San Felipe, a coastal town in Baja California.  On the way, Roy, who is impulsive and a bit of a hot head, decides to stop in Mexicali to sample the flesh-pots there.  Gilbert, who is more level-headed, doesn't want to get in trouble and, so, he pretends to be sound asleep when the two men drive between the garish neon-lights in the border town.  Roy is loyal to his buddy and the two men don't stop.  On the way out of town, they pick-up a hitchhiker -- before the credits, we have seen this guy, portrayed as a pair of sinister boots stalking around, gun down three victims, people who have picked him up.  The little and abortive "lark and spree" in Mexicali has now put the men in harm's way.  For the remainder of the short (71 minute) film, the hitchhiker torments them until his luck runs out and he is captured by the Mexican police.  Edmund O'Brien plays the excitable Roy; Frank Lovejoy takes the part of the even-keeled Gilbert (who can speak Spanish) and William Tallman, later well-known for playing the indefatigable DA Hamilton Burger on The Perry Mason Show, is very effective as the psycho-killer.  The hitch-hiker is like a figure from a horror movie -- he has a deformed eye that can not close and a broad grin of filthy teeth.  The guy is awful to look at and this mirrors, of course, his moral depravity.

The Library of Congress has cited The Hitch-Hiker as worthy of preservation primarily because it is the first film noir to be directed by a woman, Ida Lupino.  Unfortunately, the movie really isn't any good.  The acting is fine but the script is lackluster and the film isn't exactly plausible.  The movie's climax is so dull that it can't be called a climax -- the picture just ends in a muddle of very dimly lit shots on a dock.  I got tired trying to decipher the very dark pictures on my TV screen and fell asleep four minutes before the short film ended -- I had to go back to re-run the denouement to see if I had missed anything.  (I hadn't.)  For most of the film, we see repeated shots of the car carrying the three men driving aimlessly around the Alabama Hills, 20 or so hectares of picturesque-looking hoodoos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada at Lone Pine.  Lupino shoots in the opposite direction of the Mount Whitney and, so, everything looks desolate, squat stone boulders heaped up in disarray against a dusty horizon.  But she uses the same vantage so many times that the imagery becomes tiresome -- it's obviously the same dirt road over which the car travels first in one direction and, then, the other direction.  Apparently, the script derives from the adventures of an actual spree-killer who haunted the upper Baja peninsula and was caught by Mexican police, as in this film, at the fishing village of Santa Rosalie.  (Certain other elements of the actual story find their way into the picture -- for instance, the real killer threw his victims down a mine-shaft; in this movie, some scenes are shot around a mine-shaft that is shown to be very deep and dark, but nothing actually happens there).  The story doesn't make sense -- it's not clear why the heroes can't run away at night (after all, the bad guy has to sleep.)  Furthermore, we don't know why the killer has taken the men hostage -- what is the use of lugging them around the country when he could just kill them somewhere in the badlands of the Alabama Hills and drive their car to his ultimate destination?  (We know he can drive a car -- he uses the car to hunt down the two men when they briefly escape.)  Clearly, Lupino is working on micro-budget:  In one night-time scene, shot in the studio, she puts the two hostages in sleeping bags on one side of a creek while the bad guy keeps his gun trained on them, even while he sleeps with his deformed eye open.  The creek looks like a trough with a garden hose running water down its center and the schematic shot doesn't look anything like a real place outdoors.  Throughout the film, the bad guy has taunted the two heroes (although this is also a misnomer -- they never do anything even remotely heroic):  at one point, he makes them shoot bottles out of each other's hands.  The killer's argument (and the moral of the film) is that he can prey upon the two men because they look out for one another -- Roy won't desert Gilbert and vice-versa.  Thus, they are vulnerable to his depredations.  "One of you coulda got away easy," he crows.  The guy is nasty and, of course, the audience wants to see him get his come-uppance.  But the film is decent -- there's no gory retribution:  after the cops handcuff the hitchhiker, Roy slugs him a couple times, but the police pull him away, noting somewhat incongruously that "(they) must prepare their report."  It would be nice to argue that this pioneering work by the very tough Ida Lupino is a masterpiece or, even, pretty good -- but, simply stated, it's mediocre. And, it's very merits, the film's decency, at its climax, detract from its effectiveness.  David Thomson noted in hs book of film biographies that Ida Lupino was capable of making movies as "tough and fast" as Sam Fuller.  But I think Fuller's movies are vastly overrated too.

The Other Side of the Wind

Netflix has assembled Orson Welles' legendary last project, The Other Side of the Wind, a film maudit shot between 1970 and 1976 and edited, intermittently, during the last decade of the great director's life -- Welles died in 1985 with the film only partly cut, bequeathing to posterity a 100 hours of footage and a chaotic mass of instructions and memoranda.  I use the term "bequeathing" advisedly --  Welles' estate was a mess, besieged by competing factions and, of course, creditors desirous of recouping their investment in the picture.  For most of my life, critics and journalists have breathlessly reported that someone was working on the film and that release was imminent.  But these reports were always wrong -- the movie remained under legal lock-and-key and was not released until November 2018.  Peter Bogdonovich, who appears extensively in the picture, seems to have been instrumental in securing the movie's completion and release -- but Bogonovich, himself, has grown old in these efforts.  After Citizen Kane, Welles' work labored under a sort of curse, vexed by all sorts of problems, many of them self-inflicted -- Welles woes sometimes seem to have been contagious.  Bogdonovich's own career has been blighted as well. 

In a broad way, The Other Side of the Wind resembles Truman Capote's and incomplete Roman a clef, Answered Prayers.  The film, like Capote's draft of a book, is fantastically ambitious, yet, also, weirdly gossipy -- it's an account of a famous, or some might say, infamous film-maker's last day alive, a movie that is surely intended to invoke for the cognoscenti real personalities in Hollywood and the film industry.  In fact, a number of actual directors appear in the picture, notably Bogdonovich, Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, and Curtis Harrington.  Industry stalwarts like Darryl Zanuck are mentioned and someone who looks like Dennis Hopper mutters to the camera that he wants to produce a film that will attract John Wayne fans.  The film within the film seems to parody Antonioni and there are innumerable "inside" allusions.  Various sorts of Hollywood celebrities appear either in person or by proxy -- Lili Palmer, whose beautifully impassive mask-like visage dominates many of the images, imitates Marlene Dietrich; Georgie Jessel appears as himself.  As with Capote's unfinished magnum opus, the film is concerned with fashion, notoriety, envious gossip, and most of its running time is devoted to a party for the 70th birthday of the film director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston) -- a party at which Hannaford's unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind is sporadically screened.  (There are power outages that plunge the assembled multitudes in darkness during the screening -- thus, allowing Welles to demonstrate elaborate and picturesque chiaroscuro techniques.)  The film's conceit is that Hannaford's celebrity is so great that a hundred or more videographers and cineastes (a term hurled around with contempt) have crashed the party and filmed its proceedings, either covertly or with the permission of those in attendance.  The movie is shot on a variety of film stocks, all spliced together, probably a device that allowed Welles to shoot the movie as economics dictated and according to what kind of film he could afford at the time.  Although the movie was filmed at intervals over six years, it is surprisingly coherent -- it seems, however, that Welles likely invited his participants to large blow-out parties and, in some cases, simply recorded their antics. 

In all respects, the film adopts meta-filmic strategies. This is evident in the opening, a sort of foreword, that seems to be appended to the movie by Bogdonovich  who narrates behind still shots, including an image of the car crashed by Hannaford -- at the very outset, we are uncertain whether Bogdonovich, who speaks of "many years" lapsing between the time that the film was shot and it's final release, is describing a fiction or the actual series of events resulting in the film that we are seeing.  Throughout the movie, we are continuously teased with the notion that the film is a sort of distorted documentary, that it is showing us something about Orson Welles, although the director as actor never appears in the movie.  The film poses an initial riddle to be solved, a bit like the structure of Citizen Kane and Welles' later films like Mr. Arkadin -- did Hannaford commit suicide in the smashed car after the party?  Or was the crash a mere accident?  (As in Godard's Contempt, the sports car crash is a metaphor for a film that is vexed and can't be successfully completely, what we would call a "train-wreck.)  Borges' famously characterized Citizen Kane as a "labyrinth without a center" and this description applies even more aptly to The Other Side of the Wind -- the riddle posited as the film's raison d'etre is never solved.  Indeed, most of the enigmas devised by the film remain mysterious through the picture's final image.  And, at the outset, we are confronted with the question of how closely we should equate Welles and his baroque career with the central character, the 70-year old Jake Hannaford.  In fact, the equation is never clear and, at times, it seems that Welles is, in fact, satirizing Huston himself, that Huston's persona as big game hunter, bullfighting aficionado, womanizer, and drunk with tendencies toward self-harm (papa Hemingway for movie-land) is a sort of joke to which Huston may not be fully privy -- Huston plays a self-aggrandizing monster, a sacred monster who speaks in aphorisms and seems to be boundlessly narcissistic.  In some ways, he's like Welles as a bombastic, Falstaffian fixture on the late night TV shows -- he was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson and with Dick Cavett -- but, in other noteworthy respects, Hannaford is a parody of Huston's Hemingway affectations.  (Hannaford's 70th birthday is on July 2 -- the date Hemingway killed himself.)  But there's another element, one that seems obsessively if queasily superimposed on the narrative:  Hannaford's sexual vigor is waning and Welles shows the old man watching the sex scenes staged in the film within a film with a savage voyeuristic concentration -- Huston is shown in huge, unflattering close-up, his eyes bearing down on the images projected on the screen.  In the fragmentary film shown at the party, a handsome youth has sex with a beautiful older woman.  The older woman is nude for, at least, a third of the film within the film, mostly shown from the rear ambling around various scenic locations.  The older woman is played by Oja Kodar, Welles' mistress who is given a co-writing credit on the picture, and the sex scenes, very graphic by Welles' standards, seemed presented for the aging director's delectation -- he seems simultaneously aroused and intensely jealous as he watches footage of love scenes that he himself directed.  (This aspect of the movie bears resemblance to Welles' last completed picture, his adaptation of Isak Dineson's The Immortal Story, an uncharacteristically restrained and short film about an old man who arranges for a much younger man to seduce and impregnate his beautiful young wife.)  There is something perverse about the way that Oja Kodar is used in the film -- the camera both loves and despises her and her explicit sexual voracity is shown to be emasculating.  (The movie abounds in subtle, and not so subtle, castration imagery -- in fact, a final scene shows an inflatable bag of air shaped unmistakably like a phallus torn apart by the blade of a scissors.  In an early shot, someone asks if Hannaford regards the camera as "phallus.")  At the same time, Kodar as exotic sexual vampire is also referred to as God -- it's Hannaford's contention that God is female; she's also the archetypal "dark woman" from America's psychosexual thickets:  the movie is distinctly politically incorrect:  Kodar is referred to as "Pocahontas" and "Minnehaha" and she prances around nude, her skin glowing red in the "magic hour twilight", dressed only in turquoise necklaces. In any event, there's something distinctly unsettling about Kodar's presence in the film:  she's Welles' obscure object of desire, simultaneously the castrating Mother, the savage and sexually reapacious Indian maiden, God, the Devil, and the mythic object of the hero's quest. A haze of confusion hovers over the figure:  Kodar is also completely silent -- she exists solely as an object of contemplation for the male gaze.  Although we see her at the party, there's no indication that she can speak at all or that she has anything to say.  In the movie, she's mostly completely silent -- a nude phantasm darting through some psychedelic and surreal arcade.  (I suspect that Welles keeps her quiet because Kodar spoke with a strong Serbo-croatian accent that might have identified her, that is, established a place of origin, something that the film opposes -- in The Other Side of the Wind, Kodar is pure Jungian archetype and archetypes don't have home towns and aren't chatty.)

A central question raised by The Other Side of the Wind is how we are to interpret the film-within-the-film bearing that name.  From the footage shown in the picture, The Other Side of the Wind as mise en abyme seems ludicrously bad -- the movie that Hannaford has made is awful, a kind of pretentious mélange of bad Antonioni (think Zabriskie Point) and a spaghetti Western.  (The party scenes were actually filmed in Nevada within shouting distance of the mansion Antonioni blew to pieces at the end of Zabriskie Point.)  A film executive named Max, early in the movie, watches part of the picture's opening sequence and declares the whole thing a "waste of time."  But it's not clear what the executive means -- is the film a "waste of time" because its objectively awful or is the money-man commenting that he won't be able to make any profit on the Hannaford's self-indulgent project?  (Hannaford, we learn, is proceeding without a script -- although this seems contradicted by a later scene in which we are shown hundreds and hundreds of story-boarded images from the film.)   One of the characters announces that Hannaford, who began his career in silent films, is trying to make a movie for young people to show that he's "still with it" -- that is, relevant.  And the film-within-a-film is replete with garish rock-n-roll sequences, several of them very effectively filmed, psychedelic light shows, casual sex, drug use, and the like.  But Welles surely must know that the symbolic maunderings of the film-within-a-film, despite the beautiful way in which the scenes are shot and staged, are objectively terrible, indeed, risible -- in fact, interviews confirm that Welles regarded the film-within-the-film as a parody and a sort of joke.  But the people at the party are all predictably obedient and seem to consider the picture that Hannaford is making as some sort of masterpiece.  I presume this is Welles' satire on himself, on the notion that the great auteur can do no wrong.  (The auteur theory is represented in the film by the hapless Joseph McBride, an early essayist on Welles, here cast as the scholarly cinephile "Mister Pister.")   But it's not clear to what degree we are supposed to regard the film-within-the-film as wretched -- the satire is blurred, particularly because Welles' filmmaking is so ingenious and technically assured that he can't shoot an uninteresting frame of footage.  Although Hannaford's The Other Side of the Wind (as opposed to Welles' film of that same name) seems horribly flawed, it is, nonetheless, compulsively watchable.

As The Other Side of the Wind proceeds, the film (here meaning the whole enterprise) becomes increasingly cruel, desperate, and sad.  The specter of Hannaford's suicide (or accidental death) casts a shadow over everything.  Sources of funding for the film-within-the-film dry up -- the studio shows no interest, some Texas oil-men proposing funding vamoose, and, finally, Hannaford "puts the touch" on his protégée Brooksie Otterlake.  Otterlake has been successful with his pictures and he is the scion of a lumber dynasty.  Hannaford simultaneously denounces others for suggesting that Otterlake be tapped for money while, at the same time, making a demand for cash himself.  When Otterlake hesitates, Hannaford directs his rage at his protégée and the film ends with the two men tragically estranged.  (This mirrors Bogdanovich's relationship with Welles.  When Welles mocked him on TV on the Tonight Show, making demeaning comments to the guest host, Burt Reynolds of all people, their previously close relationship soured and Bogdanovich didn't talk to Welles again until a few weeks before the old man died.  The rift prophetically on display in The Other Side of the Wind also arises in a context in which Welles seems to be cruelly caricaturing Cybil Shepherd, then, Bogdanovich's wife -- Hannaford has a baby-concubine, a little 16-year old blonde named Mavis, cute as a button, but so stupid that people mock her to her face.  Her principal role in the movie is to pour drinks for Huston's character.  Critics claim the character was based on the very young Cybil Shepherd who began her relationship with Bogdanovich during the shooting of The Last Picture Show.)  Welles taunts John Dale while directing a sex scene with Oja Kodar -- Dale's genitals somehow get tangled in Kodar's dangly necklace and she has to use an alarmingly sharp knife to cut the necklace free.  Needless to say, this interlude intimidates Dale and Hannaford, while shouting voice-over directions to his actors, implies that he's impotent.  Dale, then, stalks off the set creating yet another impediment to the film's completion.  At the party, things become increasingly dire.  Hannaford and Otterlake, with their nasty cronies (led by the loyal Edmund O'Brien) mock a schoolmaster who has been invited to the party to share salacious anecdotes about John Dale. It's no surprise that these anecdotes all suggest that Dale is homo- or, at least, bi-sexual.  (One hopes that Welles didn't act the way that Hannaford is shown as behaving -- Hannaford ceaselessly bullies people both on the set and at the party, generally employing sexually inflected taunts to compel his actors to despise one another.  We know that Fassbinder behaved compulsively in this way, both from an innate sadism and a notion that the more tension he created on the set, the better the performances.  This seems to be Hannaford's modus operandi.)  Midgets get on the roof and start shooting off fireworks.  Hannaford drags out a puny-looking rifle and begins to gun down the paper-mache dummies of John Dale posted in the rocks by the swimming pool.  He engages in a racist rant about killing Indians, calls Oja Kodar "Pocahontas" whereupon she gets a gun and starts shooting lanterns (the power outage remains ongoing), presumably in the hope of burning down the house.  Aware that the film will never be completed, many of Hannaford's acolytes and "yes-men" decamp, several of them indicating they plan to work with the studios on films that can make money.  The Baron, Hannaford's longsuffering scriptwriter describes the director's remaining supporters, most of them old alcoholics, as "the good soldiers" like the men who crossed the Alps with Napoleon and Hannibal.  The film critic, modeled on Pauline Kael, announces to the world that Hannaford always seduced the wives of his leading men so as to "possess his actors" by possessing their women -- her gossip suggests Hannaford's conflicted sexuality, something that has been on display throughout the movie.  Welles engages in a little wish-fulfillment here:  he has one of Hannaford's henchmen punch the critic in the jaw, knocking her out.  The party-goers adjourn to an outdoor theater where everyone gets increasingly drunk and disorderly while the art film-within-the-film is projected on a huge screen in front of the parked cars.  (All of this is spectacularly filmed.)  Otterlake and Hannaford quarrel -- Otterlake says:  "What did I do to offend you Daddy?"  Hannaford tells him to kiss his ass.  Otterlake, who has attended Harvard, cites The Tempest -- there are valedictory lines about "abjuring this rough magic" and "all our revels" being ended.  Comes the dawn:  John Dale shows up in the ruins of the party.  Hannaford, who is driving the sports car, calls him "chicken", again accuses him of being unmanly (someone has earlier said "he looks like a girl") and, then, squeals away in the car in which he will die.  In the film-within-a-film projected on the screen over the vacant parking lot, we see Oja Kodar slashing apart a great blow-up phallus.  Cars are roaring by to their workaday destinations on the dawn-lit freeway behind the screen.  The film-within-the-film ends apocalyptically (although this is not really the movie's ending -- the reels are being projected out of order):  a tremendous wind roars across the desert, ripping down the film sets, and one of the John Dale dummies, caught in the vortex, has its head fall off. 

The Other Side of the Wind looks fantastic.  Welles fragments the action into thousands of shots.  The cutting is so fast that sometimes it's hard to tell what's happening.  And, yet, also true to form the movie's individual images are beautifully composed and, often, dauntingly complex, layers of reflections, mirrors, false perspectives.  The movie has a distinct musical rhythm -- it flows in a way that is inescapably powerful.  The dialogue is bitter, aphoristic, often memorable -- Welles has his actors lean in to the camera and deliver their lines in very tight, short shots:  it's like a 30's screwball comedy shot by a Cubist:  clever dialogue that is fragmented into a prismatic series of images:  one riposte per shot, then, that shot framed with reaction shots to which there are other reaction shots.  Some sequences are impenetrably complex:  an orgy in a weird psychedelic toilet is fantastically intricate -- there are 500 shots in the course of a four-minute sequence that took Welles nine-months to edit.  (This frenzied editing, of course, is partially camouflage -- Welles has to conceal that the footage was often shot at times separated by months if not years.  For much of the film's production, Otterlake was played by Rich Little -- Little couldn't act and fled the set, a bit like John Dale, causing Welles to recruit Bogdanovich for the part.  Welles didn't get Huston on-board until the very end:  this means that he shot all of the people reacting to Hannaford's character without the leading man:  Welles played that role and people were reacting to him.  When Huston became available -- it was just before he shot The Man Who Would Be King -- Welles filmed him without most of the other actors present, shooting his dialogue scenes in the course of about a week.  The fractured cutting conceals the fact that most of the principals in the film were never on-set together.  The film is exceedingly bitter and savagely cruel.  Whether the movie belongs to the highest order of Welles' work, some of which is the best in all world cinema, is disputable -- the film is too acerbic and its hard to make a successful movie about a main character who is an unmitigated louse or "prick" as Welles says in an interview.  But there is no doubt that the movie is successful on its own terms, fantastically brilliant in its mise-en-scene, and not the work of an old and tired director -- rather, the film emits a sort of wild youthful energy.  Whether the film represents Orson Welles at his best is unclear to me.  But the movie provides Welles' most intense and troubling vision of movies and how they are made and the awful price that genius imposes:  the Baron says at one point:  Hannaford displays a truth of physics -- no machine can produce as much as it must destroy in the name of that production.

(A couple of anecdotes and additional  observations:  Gary Graver, Welles' cameraman, is the only DP in Hollywood who worked both with Ed Wood and Orson Welles -- he specialized in porno films and slasher movies.  Les Moonves, the disgraced chief of NBC, is one of the participants at the party.  The baroque sex scene in which Oja Kodar mounts John Dale in the front seat of a car that another man, possibly her previous boyfriend, is driving through a rainstorm was shot over a period of three years at different locations in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Paris.  The "end money" for the film was provided by the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law -- when the Shah was deposed in 1979, the film was locked in a vault and kept there for years.  Orson Welles used to say this:  Every story has a sad ending.  If it doesn't, that's because it's not the end yet.  These anecdotes comes from a Netflix documentary accompanying The Other Side of the Wind, a picture called They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, mostly about Welles desperate attempts to get the film completed.  This is a superb documentary and anyone planning to watch The Other Side of the Wind should also make time for the documentary which is indispensable in some respects.)