Aniara

Aniara is a Greek word that means "sadness" or "despair".  The title aptly describes an exceptionally dispiriting science fiction film directed by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja that adapts for the screen a Nobel-prize winning 103 canto long "space epos" written in the mid-1950's by the Swedish poet, Harry Martinson.  The film is literally a one-way trip to oblivion and, true to its name, induces a sort of helpless depression in its viewers -- when I saw the film at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis, the small audience filed out of the auditorium in gloomy silence.  It was a windy night and the rain-wet streets seemed darker and more menacing than they had been before I came to the theater.  The most popular critical take on the film is that it is like Star Trek as directed by Ingmar Bergman -- a morose plunge in Scandinavian angst and darkness.  In fact, Bergman's films often offer some glimmer of hope and, at their greatest, provide the complex pleasures of tragedy.  Aniara seems more akin to Lars von Trier's horribly distressing Melancholia, also apocalyptic Science Fiction in which the subjective state of clinical depression becomes an objective correlative (or is it vice-versa) for the end of the earth when the moon draws near and smashes into our planet.  After that film, also uniquely dispiriting, most of the audience were speechless with misery although some people were so distressed they felt that they had to discuss the picture with complete strangers and seek reassurance that it was, in fact, a bad movie.  (Melancholia, like Aniara, is not a bad movie -- but I don't know that I can recommend these deep dives in stygian gloom to anyone.) 

In Aniara, about 400 passengers embark on a three-week voyage to Mars.  The space ship is like a casino-hotel connected to several nice shopping malls.  It has plenty of haute cuisine restaurants, shops, a big swimming pool, and something called Mimara, a virtual reality emporium where people can come to experience idyllic pastoral scenes as a respite from the austere bunk rooms and the shopping malls.  The space-ship carries refugees from a world that climate change has rendered infernal -- many of the people seem to have suffered severe, even disfiguring facial burns, although this aspect of their appearance is never overtly mentioned.  Some nuts and bolts of space debris are floating around and one of them knocks the space-craft off course.  The space-craft's pilot tells the frightened passengers that the trip may last as long as two years -- the ship needs to loop around the gravity of another planet to get back on course.  But the pilot knows that the ship is now heading into the oblivion of outer space and that it will never reach Mars or anywhere else for that matter.  At first, the people on the vessel try to make the best of their plight -- after all, they expect to be home in a few years.  The ship has algae in huge tanks that photosynthesize to produce oxygen and the algae is also edible -- the steaks and shrimp in the expensive restaurants run out in about two months.  After a few years, the people on the space-ship start to go mad.  They invent strange religious cults.  There situation becomes more desperate when the Mimara virtual reality machine goes crazy itself and starts broadcasting images of fire and death and destruction.  The virtual reality system is closed although its empty room -- people experienced the VR by lying face-down on the carpeted floor -- becomes a sort of shrine, and later a tabernacle for sexual orgies.  Things don't improve.  About five years into the trip to nowhere, a space craft is spotted.  The people on the vessel think  that this has been sent to provide nuclear fuel to save them.  For months, the space craft's crew work to develop devices to seize the long, narrow vessel floating in space -- it's called "the spear".  This object is several football fields long, but when it is captured, it proves to be an enigmatic artifact from some alien civilization, completely impermeable and meaningless.  Lots of people commit suicide.  By the 23rd year, there are only a dozen survivors, huddled together in the empty Mimara chamber -- the shops have been looted and the corridors are filled with garbage and corpses.  After about 5.9 million years, the space craft, now named "The Sarcophagus", reaches the Lyra constellation where it flies by a blue planet with clouds and continents.  A shot inside the sarcophagus shows that the empty tomb is weightless inside -- dust floats around in the air and we see a human mandible slowly spin by.  Thus, the film ends.

The story is told through the point of view of a female scientist called Mima, apparently, the inventor of the VR system.  After about eight or nine years, she invents a way to produce holographic images so that the survivors in the ship can look out the window to see lush Scandinavian forests and meadows with waterfalls -- whether this cheers anyone up or just contributes to their despair is unclear.  In the tenth year of the voyage, called "Jubilee", the pilot gives Mima a medal to celebrate her accomplishment in creating the holographic system.  His wrists are bloody and bandaged from a suicide attempt.  Mima goes to her bedroom, now filled with dirty clothing, throws the medallion aside, and sprawls face-down on the bed, too miserable to even cry.  Earlier she had a love affair with a female pilot named Isagel -- Isagel had sex with one of the men on the ship and gave birth to a baby.  But Isagel kills herself at the three-quarter point in the film and drowns the baby as well.  All of this is more or less unbearable -- and I've left out many, many other deaths that the film scrupulously, and clinically, documents. 

The movie is terrifically claustrophobic.  For the most part, it is shot in extreme close-ups.  Some of the close-ups are so tight that the images seem extracted from an experimental film by Stan Brakhage -- we see an eyelash, a milky eye, skin pocked with pores like craters.  A disconcerting element is the occasional presence of facially disfigured burn victims in the movie -- at least several of these people seem to be real burn victims.  If they were Klingons or some sort of odd alien life form, their ugliness would startle, perhaps, but not disturb -- but they are people who are, in fact, mutilated and their presence in the movie is terrible reminder of the sort of horrible conditions prevailing on earth.  I suppose the film is allegorical, a bit like von Trier's Melancholia.  We are destroying our space vessel by overheating it with carbon emissions -- the earth is like the space-ship in the movie, a craft on a one-way trip to nowhere.  And, indeed, the film raises this question:  aren't all of us trapped on this planet and, therefore, doomed by what we have done to it?  Life is hopeless -- only the dead are fortunate.  Isagel kills her baby because as she says:  "I am giving birth in a prison and my baby will be a prisoner.  We are all living in a sarcophagus."  But doesn't this  existential formula apply to all of us?

Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali (1955) is the sort of worthy film that I have spent my life attempting avoid.  Once I heard an interview with a woman who had become the head of India's division of Coca-Cola.  Called upon to defend selling sugary no-nutrition drinks to people in poverty, the woman responded in a perky way:  "We make products that are fun for you and products that are good for you.  It's your choice which you buy."  Satjiyat Ray's first film is too arduous, harrowing, and slow-paced to be fun for you -- it's subject is poverty unimaginable to most America viewers.  (A man labors four months and earns just enough to buy a few handfuls of rice, a sari for his daughter, a framed picture of a deity for his wife, and a bit of ratty fabric to make shawl for an old woman.)  The characters wear tattered clothing and argue viciously over a dropped guava fruit.  Everyone is constantly nibbling on something, but it doesn't seem that anything that they eat provides much nourishment.  The movie has indelible acting -- you will remember some of the performances in Pather Panchali all of your life (although those memories are not exactly pleasant) and it is beautifully shot on location: many of the black and white landscapes are beautiful.  But the subject matter, an exhausting perpetual battle with starvation, is too harsh to be fun for you.  In fact, the movie exactly met my expectations:  it is morose, extremely heartbreaking, and, ultimately, irrelevant to an upper middle-class American.  Perhaps, most of the world lives like these people, but their fate seems so deeply entrenched, so hopeless, that the picture leaves you with despair -- the poverty that Ray shows doesn't even have a cause; it's simply the way things are.  (In fairness, the dire material in Pather Panchali is part of a three-part or trilogy of films -- the entire project is a sort of Bildungsroman and possibly shows the hero ascending from the poverty that is his lot in life in the first picture.) 

A Brahman family lives in a tiny village.  The family members put on airs -- the father is a sort of poet, playwright, and, also, makes pocket-change performing religious rituals.  But they are very poor -- even by the standards of their neighbors who are also desperately impoverished.  The family once owned an interest in an orchard, but they have lost that property.  This doesn't keep the spunky, rebellious little girl in the family from picking up fruit fallen from the trees in the orchard or, even, from time to time, stealing the crop on the branches.  This little girl, Durga, is reputed to be a thief and one motif in the film relates to this reputation and how it reflects on her sad-eyed, harried mother.  The mother gives birth to a baby boy -- this is Apu, the protagonist in Ray's trilogy.  Apu is sent to school -- it's run by a tyrannical local grocer and he learns to read and write.  Durga, of course, will have to be married-off, although, for some reason, she doubts that she will ever be a bride.  Freeloading off the family is an elderly woman -- everyone calls her Auntie.  She's malicious and temperamental -- age has bent her double and she's a frightening apparition with only one or two teeth in her sunken jaw, half her face seemingly paralyzed, and always  shrilly complaining that she has no shawl to keep off the evening chill.  The film was made in West Bengal and it seems always to be stifling -- no one wears much clothing: Auntie just has some rags wrapped around the front of her torso, she's mostly naked behind.  Durga has been stealing guava to keep Auntie alive -- otherwise, it seems that she might simply starve to death.  Various low-key adventures occur:  a group of traveling players comes to town, Durga is accused of stealing a necklace and this causes a terrific battle between mother and daughter, a candy seller plies his wares in the village and a man who has a sort of magic lantern device that shows the wonders of India solicit the children for pennies.  Apu and Durga's father who is feckless, if kind, leaves to earn money in Benares.  His wife has denounced him for not taking an advance fee for a ceremony that he has been asked to perform at the coming of age of two sons of a neighbor in the village -- her criticism turns out to be right:  both boys die and the father doesn't earn the fee.  While he is gone, Auntie dies.  Durga and Apu go across a meadow to see a train chugging by.  This is the first time they have seen a locomotive and it makes them deliriously happy.  The summer heat is broken by the monsoon.  Durga rapturously washes her hair in the downpour, gets sick, and dies.  Father returns from Benares with a sari for Durga and collapses in grief when he learns that she has died.  Durga's death frees the family from their ancestral home and village.  In the final shot, we see them huddled together in an ox-cart heading across the swampy roads for the big city.  It's twilight and they have a lantern hanging from the side of the wagon.  (Ermanno Olmi duplicates this shot in his similar film The Tree of the Wooden Clogs -- it's also the last scene in that movie.) 

This narrative is elegantly presented in a series of luminous close-ups, squalid interior scenes, and beautiful landscape imagery.  Apparently, water-striders on ponds signify the heat of summer and Ray has a long sequence comprised simply of bugs (dragonflies and water-striders) skimming over a pool full of lotus blossoms -- it's an exquisite calligraphic image and prepares us for the onslaught of the monsoon which ends up killing Durga and destroying most of the family's outbuildings next to crumbling stone farmhouse where they live.  The landscapes in general have a distracting beauty which conceals the fact that no one has enough to eat in this area.  We don't ever see the village as a whole -- Ray uses no establishing shots:  it's simply some trees, pathways, a little stone altar, and the insides of gloomy houses.  The poor are not idealized -- indeed, they have flaws that are apparent for all to see.  Sabaryaya, the sad housewife, is arrogant and ill-tempered:  in the nasty fight with her daughter, she drags the girl around by the hair.  The father is useless, a dreamer, who can't make any money to support his family.  Most surprisingly, the elderly woman is a sort of monster -- she is self-centered, filches food from others, and, when she doesn't get her way, angrily limps away to live with someone else (although she always returns).  Apu is wide-eyed and a beautiful child but he is not above stealing his sister's few toys -- he takes tinfoil from her "toy box" to make a silver moustache for himself in imitation of one of the traveling players.  Durga is a thief -- in fact, after she has died, Apu discovers a cup where a ugly-looking spider lives; in the cup, there is the necklace that Durga stole from the neighbor-lady.  This woman is arrogant and hostile, a gossip, and seems to be very cruel -- but when the family runs the risk of starvation, she is the first to offer them rice to tide them over.  The movie is wildly unstable mixture of the poetic and the deeply disturbing:  Auntie dies squatting against a tree in a beautiful landscape next to a little path engraved in the meadow by thousands of years of people walking back and forth over it (the movie's title means "The Song of the Little Road'); the camera frames the candy-seller trudging with his double baskets and yoke through the monsoon rains, then, tilts down to show Durga, comatose, dying with her eyes open.  When the monsoon blows down an outbuilding, an overhead shot shows an unholy mess of fallen timbers and thatching with a huge dead bullfrog in the center of the composition.  When Apu is born, we first see him as a swaddling bundles -- someone lifts up a corner of the rags to reveal a great staring eye.  It's this eye, mechanized as a camera, that will govern the film.  When famine strikes, Apu's mother sells all the brass serving platters and tea pots that she received in her wedding.  Later, when a neighbor discovers that the family is down to only a few handfuls of rice, she offers to loan the starving neighbors some of her rice.  "Oh no," Apu's mother proudly says.  "I can sell my brass vessels from the wedding"-- but we know that she has already pawned them.  After Durga's death, Apu's father says that "All my plans have come to nothing."  At last, he echoes his wife's complaint that she had always hoped for a better life but that this village is strangling her death.  Underlying all of the exotic, and fabulous imagery is the music of Ravi Shankar providing a counterpoint to the misery that we are shown. 

Renoir made his film The River (1951), also involving the death of a child, in West Bengal and employed Satjiyat Ray as an assistant.  Renoir's 1934 film Toni, about migrant workers in the south of France, is viewed as the progenitor of the Italian neo-realist movement.  Renoir's The River is a meditation on the allegedly documentary truth revealed by Italian neo-Realist films, an attempt to apply the elements of that canon to India.  Ray continues neo-realism in his films, at least, at the outset of his career -- twenty years later, when Ermanno Olmi makes The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, he pirates the last shot of the peasants departing for an uncertain future in the big city from Ray's picture for his own movie.  Thus, film influences circle, spiral and loop.

Mil Mascaras v. Aztec Mummy

Like masterpieces, truly bad films are hard to make and rare to see.  The world is full of mediocre movies, but a film that is truly awful can be paradoxically memorable and, even, perhaps raise questions about the nature of the medium itself.  In a fundamental way, film is a spectacle that people are willing to pay to behold.  Spectacle can mean many things -- after all, people pay good money to attend professional wrestling matches; indeed, the current President of the United States was once closely affiliated with the World Wrestling Federation and Miss Universe.  At its essence, a movie is a light show with words and music, son et lumiere and a transcendentally terrible move like Mil Mascaras v. The Aztec Mummy (2010 Andrew Quint aka Jeff Burr & Chip Gubera) reveals some uncomfortable truths about films and film-making.  As Pauline Kael pointed out, the greatest films are often the silliest -- that is, the closest to plummeting into cult badness.  Most films are trash and sometimes a consumer and critic needs to be reminded of this fact from time to time.

A bad movie on the heroic scale has several characteristics:  first the filmmaker's paltry means are so pathetically incommensurate with his ambition (with very few exceptions the makers of really bad movies are all men, usually hustlers of some kind -- this gender distinction deserves further thought as well.).  Thus, such films are often wildly ambitious, but lack the budget, technical means, and skill to achieve the desired ends.  Movies of this kind often arise in cultic subcultures -- for instance, Mil Mascaras is Mexican masked wrestler film (a so-called Luchadora), a genre without honor, cross-bred with a horror film, another Mexican genre, the Aztec mummy movie.  In films of these kinds -- and Exhibit A is oeuvre of Ed Wood -- the actors are given flamboyantly florid and overwritten lines to speak:  this kind of dialogue would tax the skills of Lawrence Olivier, but must be delivered by an actor who seems scarcely capable of speaking English and may be half illiterate.  Commensurate with the film's overweening ambition is its grandiose plot -- generally something about saving the world that would require fifty million dollars in special effects.  But the budget is tragically low so that the filmmaker is required to desperately improvise to merely hint at the majestic images that he would supply if only he had more than the credit limit on his mother's MasterCard for financing.  As I have noted above, the truly scary thing about these films is that they are monstrously exploitative, garishly designed to push the buttons in the "deplorable" who rages within all of us -- in this respect, these films are only a hair's breadth from pictures like Avengers:  Endgame in which thirty seconds of film probably cost twenty times what was spent to make Mil Mascaras v. The Aztec Mummy -- and, yet, Mils Mascaras is about ten times as interesting and fun as the 200 million dollar spectacle that is the most recent Avengers movie.

In an Aztec tomb hidden beneath a pyramid that is incongruously within walking distance of central Mexico City, a strange ritual is taking place.  In a torchlit crypt, a beautiful half-naked woman does a sensuous snake dance around a sarcophagus containing a hideous Aztec mummy.  A fat priest intones some words and, then, another fat, bare-chested campesino performs an auto-sacrifice, using a flint blade to wrench his still beating heart from his chest, smearing blood all over the jaws of the Aztec Mummy.  The Mummy, needless to say, comes to life and vows, for some reason, to take over the world.  Meanwhile in a posh restaurant, the great masked wrestler Mil Mascaras ("Thousand Masks") is dining with his blonde girlfriend.  She says that she is leaving him.  Mil asks her mournfully if it is because his face "must always be covered with a mask."  She denies this motive but it's pretty clear that she is a bigot of the worst kind -- prejudiced against Mexican masked wrestlers.  Poor Mil goes out by a stream where he broods on his sad fate:  "Why must I wear this mask?" he cries.  The Aztec Mummy and his cadaver henchmen (or hypnotized minions) are robbing blood banks in the city.  The Mummy uses a scepter with a hypnagogic gem to mesmerize a sulky young man who helps with the robberies.  Mil is very good friends with a handsome scientist, the Professor.  The scientist has built a robot warrior in his lab and has a beautiful young daughter who "has feelings for" Mil.  Mil thwarts a blood bank robbery resulting in the sulky young zombie being dragged back to the Aztec tomb where he is tortured to death -- "the Aztecs," the scientist tells us, "have mastered all of the arts of torture."  Mil Mascaras, who is also a pilot, flies to Washington D.C. where he meets with the President and tells him that the nation is under attack by zombies and the Aztec Mummy.  (It's a little unclear why he flies to Washington when the Mummy and his army of undead are in Mexico City, but this detail is never exactly explained.)The joint chiefs of staff are skeptical about the presentation made by the wrestler in his elaborate be-gemmed mask and tight leotards, but they give him 48 hours to destroy the Aztec Mummy.  Why?  And what will happen after the 48 hours?  These are imponderables.  Mil Mascaras has other tasks on his mind -- for instance, he has to fight several championship bouts, including a tag-team match.  In his last bout, the Mummy sends a zombie to inhabit the body of Mil's opponent and he almost loses the match.  Then, at a restaurant where Mil is celebrating his difficult victory, a waiter serves him psilocybin mushrooms as an appetizer.  Mil experiences a colorful psychedelic trip in the restaurant's toilet.  But he recovers and with the scientist and the Chief of Police of Mexico City, a comical African-American, Mil attacks the Aztec Mummy's stronghold.  The Mummy has kidnapped the Professor's daughter and there is a desperate battle between the Mummy with his undead army and Mils.  Just when things look the darkest, the Professor's Robot intervenes going mano et mano with the Mummy.  This provides only temporary respite.  The tide is finally turned when about eight other masked Mexican wrestles including Santo, the Blue Demon, "Hurricane" Ramirez and el Hijo de Santo (the son of Santo) join the attack. 

What makes this movie astonishing is that it was filmed entirely in Jefferson City, Missouri.  In some sequences, Mil and the grinning, half-witted Chief of Police stride through a spectacular palace -- it's apparently the Missouri State Capitol building, something that is obvious from the maps of Missouri hanging on the walls.  (Someone has draped a Mexican flag over a marble balustrade to show that this film is set in Mexico City.)  The two showpiece wrestling matches take place in small theaters with maybe forty spectators.  The Ozarks stand in for the Yucatan, although, of course, the Aztecs didn't live in the Yucatan which is, also, nowhere near Mexico City -- the Aztec Mummy's tomb is one of the pyramids at Tikal.  The film ignores major plot points but luxuriates in morose reveries about Mil's ancestors "being forced to wear the mask thousands of years ago."  Indeed, there are detailed scientific explanations provided for how Mil manages to change masks about every three minutes in the movie -- the Professor determines that the masks simply alter "genetically" clinging to Mil's face.  The film oozes machismo -- but it has weird interludes:  in one the Destructor, one of Mils opponents is lured into sexual encounter with a demon inhabiting the body of a beautiful woman:  when the wrestler realizes that he's just had sex with a male demon, he contorts his face as if he eating something very foul, indeed, these expressions concealed partially by his knobby insectoid mask.  Both the Aztec Mummy and Mil speak in bombastic, but extremely beautiful, mellifluous baritones.  Mils is unfailingly polite, generous and kind.  Somehow, he seems very courtly and gentlemanly even when he is bashing together the heads of his adversaries, including two lethal seductresses -- they are evil twins.  The movie is so down-and-out that it advertises as special guest stars Harley Race (who does the blow-by-blow on one of Mil matches) and P. J. Soles.  At one point, the Professor tells Mil:  "You have the mind of a scientist, the soul of an artist, the body of a great athlete, but I can't figure out what goes on behind that mask of yours."  Threatening the villainous mummy who has kidnapped the Professor's daughter to make her his bride, Mil says:  "My fist is the only bride fate has in store for you.  And the consummation shall be painful!"  The movie is garishly shot.  The backgrounds of every scene are tarted up with blue and red lights.  The Professor's daughter wears high gloss lipstick that glints lasciviously in the light.  The film's credits include not one but three "Nahuatl Advisors" and features "artifacts from the UMC Museum of Anthropology" -- presumably referring to the University of Missouri at Jeff City.  Mil Mascaras was 66 years old when the movie was made -- he still sometimes wrestles:  he is now 77.  The film was screened at Burning Man and has won just about every horror film award that exists. 

The Image Book

Jean-Luc Godard's Image Book (2019) is a fantastically complex collage of film clips, laconic aphorisms, enigmatic intertitles, and bits and pieces of accompanying music.  The film is 86 minutes long, but it will take you all your life, if you are so inclined, to watch, study, and understand.  Whether there is something in this film worth laboring over is not wholly clear to me.  This analysis must be regarded as purely provisional, preliminary, and incomplete -- indeed, there is something about the film that defeats any notion of a final analysis or last word on this movie.

Walter Benjamin speculated about the possibility of creating a work of art wholly derived from quotations from other works.  With the exception of a three or four minutes of new footage -- most notably some shots of Godard's fingers manipulating an editing machine to cut film -- every image in the picture comes from some other source.  (And, it may be, that the pictures of an old man's fingers laboriously operating a film editing machine come from other late movies by this director, possibly Goodbye to Language.)  A cineaste will recognize about half of the film sequences that comprise the movie -- I was able to identify, perhaps, a third of the footage. Godard's strategies in making this collage are so politically and thematically dense that knowing where the pictures originate adds an important dimension to the film -- but he doesn't annotate the images until the very end and, then, only incompletely.  On all levels the viewer, even if approaching the film with a generous heart, encounters obstacles -- in fact at the end of the movie Godard actually shows the chain-link fence and the daunting "no trespassing" sign with which Citizen Kane begins (as well as a similar sequence in some French film unknown to me).  The pictures zip by too fast to be contemplated -- you are always "catching up" to Godard's vertigo-inducting mélange of punning, multi-lingual (Joycean) subtitles, the pictures, and the aphoristic statements on the soundtrack that the pictures seemingly illustrate -- although I may have this backward, perhaps, the aphorisms illustrate the pictures.  The relationship between foreground and background information is perpetually shifting -- sometimes, it seems that the soundtrack is foreground; other times, the pictures are obviously more important than the words or music; most of the time a hierarchical relationship between the different ways that the film means simply is too complex too articulate.  Some of the pictures are horrific and leave a shadow darkening other images that are obviously light-hearted, fragments of movie musicals or comedies -- the range of emotions triggered by the images and the soundtrack is as broad as possible and this also disorients the viewer.  Finally, Godard's growled bearish asides on the soundtrack often seem to be gibberish -- he says something that is neatly balanced and aphoristic in structure, but you generally have no idea what he means or to what he is referring.  Hot-button political issues heave into view for a moment, but, then, are dismissed with dizzying rapidity.  The viewer's experience is one of playing "catch up, chasing a significance or paraphrase that remains always fugitive.  With these caveats, I make several observations:

First, Godard regards images as meaningless, without any significance, unless their context is defined somehow.  An image can have any number of meanings depending on the way it is used.  In the modern world, images are vorhanden -- that is, to use pheonomologial terms "on hand" to be used as equipment in the world.  The sense derives from Martin Heidegger.  Godard uses the concept of images being "on hand" as a kind of equipment (for either good or evil) by physically showing hands.  The emblematic image in the movie is a hand pointing skyward with fist clenched -- this image is extracted from a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.  The hand means that images are tools that can be manipulated (within the word "manipulated", we hear the world "hand" -- the mano in Spanish).  Godard calls the hand a "fairy with five fingers" and the notion of a hand-made film, a film that is manually constructed of images is central to the picture.  An image is without impact unless someone takes it in his or her hands.

The images of hands, particularly Leonard da Vinci's skyward-pointing finger and fist, punctuate the film and divide it into two parts.  After introducing the hand motif, Godard devises five sections, each of them enumerated and associated with a quotation or title.  The five sections equate to the hand's five fingers and may also have other thematic associations (for instance, the five senses) that I am unable to divine.  The five enumerated sequences, then, end in a hand-montage that signifies the principal division in the movie -- this division which occurs at about the half-way mark is between the essay-like thematic collages in the first point of the movie and, something, that is nominally narrative, that is, plotted in the film's second part.  The second half of The Image Book has an elliptical plot but also invokes imagery of the Middle East -- "Joyous Arabia" as a title tells us.  This imagery is avowedly "orientalist" to use Edward Said's notion that the West has constructed a series of caricatures and stereotypes of the Middle East that it, then, treats as politically accurate and, therefore, instrumental -- Godard's Arabia is palm fronds,  gorgeous calligraphy and the Koran, picturesque villages on the Mediterranean littoral, oasis palms and mud-brick houses, brightly colored paintings basking in the glorious sunshine, genies, harem girls, and, of course, terrorist (there are several images of horrific explosions).  At the conclusion of the "Joyous Arabia" sequence, Godard lists sources on a black title but the film doesn't end -- it has a deeply personal and moving coda, a l'envoi to the viewer and to the world of images.

The first section of the "five fingers" portion of The Image Book is entitled "Remakes".  This collage argues that we understand the world by using images to "remake" it.   There is no original or radically first perception of something -- we always see reality as a remake of some movie or TV show that we have earlier watched.  Images are continuously recycled.  The pictures cut together in this sequence include US soldiers interrogating a wounded Vietnamese girl (obviously a predicate for a similar scene in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket -- which Godard does not show.)  We see shots from Pasolini's Salo:  naked youths on leashes panting like dogs in front of their Fascist tormentors.  ISIS hurls prisoners into a canal; Kim Novak dives into the water in Vertigo but is saved by Jimmy Stewart.  Some girls get out of a taxi cab and approach the camera; in Murnau's Last Laugh some women are squired to a waiting taxi by Emil Jannings chivalrously holding an umbrella for them.  Sterling Haydn and Joan Crawford talk about lies and love in a clip from Johnny Guitar interrupted by empty frames of black.  Some patterns are visible -- for instance, Godard shows the harrowing end of Paisan with the Germans shoving the captured partisans into the Po River to rhyme this image with Kim Novak's plunge into the San Francisco bay and the ISIS executions (and possibly with Salo's portrait of atrocities and dying Vietnamese girl in what seems to be documentary footage), but it's also maddeningly obtuse and oblique.

The second finger is called "Le Soirees of St. Petersburg" and seems to be about images of war.  Indeed, the sequence begins with a famous shot from Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace, Natasha's first appearance, and, then, shows a ballroom sequence, cavalry charges, and battle scenes from that movie -- this imagery is heavily manipulated, much of it colorized with blinding oranges and blues leaking all over the screen.  We see little boys playing at war -- an image that will return at the end of the film in a different series of shots concluding "Joyous Arabia."  People are tortured. Bodies lie in heaps.  On the soundtrack, we hear citations from King Lear. (Cordelia is like the dying Vietnamese woman.)  A young woman is raped and speared, a shot from Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.  A man sits on the edge of a cold sea, back to us and holding a gun -- a dead woman is sprawled across the frame behind him.  War is one of film's great and perpetual subjects.  All war films remake one another.  At the end of sequence, we see rabbits gunned down in Renoir's Rules of the Game (the rabbit hunt scene) and a crocodile chases water-birds in a psychedelic-colored swamp -- nature also is war. 

The third finger is gentle and lyric -- it's a study of how trains have been used in films.  This is the most esthetically rewarding sequence of the movie and, in fact, I think it's a kind of masterpiece.  The first images in film history were Lumiere brothers Actualities showing trains pulling in to stations and Godard plays on all of the implications that trains have had for film and narrative:  we see Soviet armored trains (possibly from the movie Reds), corpses next to a train track, Nazi trains with gaunt, ghostly Jews peeping from them, Japanese triumphal trains, romantic partings in train stations, trains entering tunnels and ancient footage of trains thundering through great blizzards.  Westerns are mined for pictures of trains in the Southwestern deserts and gunslingers riding in passenger cars.  (Recall 3:10 to Yuma, a film that Godard doesn't cite).  Godard states his thesis in the middle of this section -- when something is no longer needed for survival it can become the subject of contemplation, that is, an art object.  (Trains no longer are wholly instrumental -- they are now sliding into becoming the subject of art.)  Godard reminds us that no citation is neutral:  "The words of Goethe," he says enigmatically, "become terrible when said on a small Russian railway" -- referring to some atrocity that I (fortunately) don't know (or, perhaps, an imaginary atrocity.)  The sequence ends with a glorious shot -- a man  trotting along side a train that is departing beyond a thicket of trees and brush.  The image is an elegy for every sequence in film history in which someone wistfully watched a train bearing away from them the object of their desires or carrying a young man toward his future destiny.  (For instance, the train at the end of I Vitelloni, not in this film -- my citation of these movies to which reference is not directly made in The Image Book shows how the picture works on the imagination:  it causes the viewer to supplement the collage on-screen with remembered images more significant to the viewer then the rather obscure stuff actually shown.)

The fourth finger is called "The Spirit of the Laws".  It's about law and violence, beginning with a riot scene from Peter Watkins' film on the Paris Commune, then, showing barricades, images of Montesquieu and his book, Henry Fonda as young Abe Lincoln reading the law in an idyllic meadow or by the river.  The law implies execution and we see Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc burned at the stake, the execution of Charles the First, Fonda as the tormented priest in The Wrong Man, and a sinister Judge in Dreyer's Day of Wrath.  Less obviously related to the theme of law and its execution are images of the Columbine shooting (from Gus van Sant's Elephant), men buried up to their necks in sand with horses thundering around from  Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, an man using a switchblade to kill a woman that he loves, and a grinning pinhead from Freaks intercut with shots from a porno film.  Godard tells us that "Everything done in Europe is done by Europe" -- he cites his own Weekend for a shot of burning cars and corpses.  "All is grace", the country priest says in Bresson's film of the diary of such a priest, pronouncing one kind of law (and referring us back to Fonda in the Hitchcock movie) and, then, we see tanks rumbling through a shadowy, green forest. Where there is law there is virtue and terror -- rioters rush through the streets of Athens, a reprise of the Paris Commune images with which the sequence began.  With law comes cruelty and the knowledge of sin (perhaps, the meaning of Bresson - Bernanos reference).  But law is the foundation for human society.  A lawless society can't make films.

The fifth finger, named after Michael Snow's experimental film La Region Centrale, is the shortest and most poetic.  Snow set a mechanical device on a barren hilltop in northern Onatario and, then, attached a camera to the machine.  The machine was programmed to undertake various tracking, zooming, and rotating motions -- filming the hills and forests around the camera without human intervention.  Several minutes of the film are cited in The Image Book while Godard mutters about the extinction of the species.  He says that nonetheless "we must learn to love those capable of doing this." -- That is, destroying entirely our natural world and making extinct the animals that live with us in the wilds upon which we have encroached.  We see a woman's face.  In my view, the "central region" is the human heart -- the place from which originates both the mandate of love and the will to power that has destroyed nature around us. 

The movie is punctuated at this point with another montage of hands.  Then, "Joyous Arabia" begins.  This part of the film is actually an adaptation of a 1986 novel by the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery -- Cossery spent most of his life in Paris and wrote I French. Godard shows various paintings of Moroccan and Algerian scenes, then, haltingly narrates a story about a fictional country named Dofa, somewhere near the Persian Gulf, a place without oil and, therefore, of no interest to the United States.  Godard intends some kind of commentary on the so-called Arab Spring, the wave of revolutions that toppled rulers in the Maghraib.  But the story is very unclear and hard to follow:  it seems to involve a subversive organization rebelling against Ben Kedem, the country's ruler.  Ben Kedem's younger cousin is Samantar, who may support the rebels.  This part of the film contains several iconic shots of turbulent wildly blue seas, a home on the edge of the ocean where rebels seem to be plotting and an older man in a red fez, probably representing Ben Kedem.  The revolt against Ben Kedem fails despite some car bombings.  Godard intones:  Everyone wants to be King, no one wants to be Faust -- implying I think that Godard who has dispensed with King Lear in the earlier part of the film is like Faust, searching through the images of his youth, looking for a picture to which he will say:  Remain with me.  Thou art so fair.  But the restless nature of the film seems to show this as an impossibility.  As far as I can determine, Ben Kedem abdicates, confessing his crimes to Samantar. (The pictures of a beautiful young man who I took to be Samantar -- and who is, I think, an image for Samantar is actually Albert Cossery.) Samantar leads a "counter-revolution of children" using "dynamite discovered at the derrick".  We see boys running and leaping, playing at war, and a child rolling an ecstatically red hoop across the seaside dunes.  Revolution is now a children's game.

Here is where the film seems to end with another montage of hands.  But Godard isn't willing to let it go.  He cites Ann Mieville's book Image et Parole -- something like "for the world to be better... earth, abundance, letters which overload reality... we must listen."  (Godard supervised the English subtitles and he often translates statements made in French only in fragments -- this is in keeping with one the film's final citations:  "Brecht says 'only a fragment bears the mark of reality'.")  Godard's voice is increasingly hoarse.  He says that when "the I talks to myself, then, I produce the words of another."  The last sequence is intensely moving -- Godard cites Ophuls Le Plaisir (the first de Maupassant story "The Mask":  a man is dancing wildly with several young women.  The man wears a mask.  Suddenly, he whirls about and falls down.  One of the young women with whom he was dancing stares at him horrified -- her beautiful smitten image ends the film.  On the soundtrack Godard is making a phlegmy congested statement about "youth" and "ardent hope."  Godard doesn't show the next shot in Ophuls film -- someone removing the mask from the dying dancer to show that the bland, youthful disguise conceals an elderly man.  This is Godard's comment on this film and his relationship to it -- to live, he has told us, is to produce.  But the dance is now potentially fatal.  A mask turns us into an image but, one day, the mask must also must fall away.

Machorka-Muff

Jean Marie Straub, credited with directing Machorka-Muff (1963) describes the film in an opening creidt as "An Abstract Visual Dream -- not a Story."  In fact, the picture has a complex narrative -- whether you regard it as a "dream" or story or, most probably, a nightmare is probably immaterial.  But it's worth knowing what happens in the movie.

Machorka-Muff is German military officer, an alumnus of Hitler's Wehrmacht.  It would do disservice to the man to call him a Nazi.  He's something more ancient -- a German aristocrat, inbred and arrogant, the scion of a dynasty whose male family members have always made war, or preparations for war, their trade.  Machorka-Muff (MM as I'll call him) is trim, exquisitely groomed, handsome and articulate -- he's also a thorough-going cad as far as women are involved, something to be expected of an aristocrat of his pedigree.  He is a staunch old-fashioned Catholic as well, a Conservative, and, somewhat out of sorts since sidelined after the German defeat in the recent world war.  MM comes to Bonn at night, surveys the town from his hotel room, and, then, has what he terms a "capitol city dream" -- he sees himself approaching three eerily draped statues on featureless stone plinths.  When he pulls aside the drapery, MM sees that the figure represent him, wearing a new, freshly pressed general's uniform.  MM has come to deliver a speech at the laying of a cornerstone.  (A military academy is being constructed over the cornerstone.)  In the morning after his strange dream, an old army buddy comes to see MM.  MM speculates as to whether he can seduce his buddy's wife -- in a voice-over he tells us that he enjoys "petite bourgeois erotics."   A politician appears in the hotel.  The army buddy is dismissed -- the two men have been nostalgically enjoying old war stories:  MM recalls with glee how his brigade was down to only 13 men and, then, "(he) had to have four of them shot for mutiny."  Good times as far as these guys are concerned.  The politician suggests that MM will be made a general, a particular honor since this will occur "in a democracy."  MM has an assignation with a girlfriend.  He is so happy about the prospect of being made a general that he wanders joyfully around Bonn, looking at various advertisements and window-shopping. A montage interlude ensues showing articles in various German newspapers about Adenauer reinstituting the Wehrmacht -- various theologians are quoted to say that Christians make the best soldiers and that Jesus would not have hesitated to raise an army for self-defense.  His girlfriend picks him up in her convertible and they go somewhere to have sex.  MM tells us on the voice-over that his girlfriend has been married previously seven times -- these seven earlier marriages equate to his seven war wounds.  Another politician appears at the place where MM and his girlfriend are staying -- the man has brought a general's uniform, a resplendent garment that everyone admires.  MM goes to where the cornerstone is being laid and delivers an address -- the military academy will be named after Marshal Hinlanger-Hiss, a commander who was unfairly traduced after World War II.  Hitler, affectionately known as "the Tapir", denounced poor Hinlanger-Hess because in a disastrous battle the general lost only 8,000 men.  Hitler concluded that a valiant defense would have killed at least 12,000 soldiers.  MM states that he's researched the matter and now knows that Hinlanger-Hiss' battle destroyed no fewer that 14,500 soldiers thus demonstrating the Field Marshal's courage, valor, and prowess in spilling the blood of his troops.  This serves to vindicate Hinlanger-Hiss and the new military institute is named after him.  A sad-looking little brass band plays a patriotic song and the cornerstone is laid.  MM and his girlfriend, then, attend Mass.  The priest notes that since all of her previous marriages were Protestant, none of them really existed, and, so, she can now marry MM in a grand church wedding.  MM and his new wife, married for her 8th time, go on a honeymoon to the Bodensee. She remarks happily:  "This is how I always feel as a new bride."  Someone suggests that there is opposition to the new Wehrmacht general, MM.   MM's wife responds vehemently:  "No one dares to oppose our family."  The film cuts to black on those words and the movie is done. 

Here is the most remarkable thing:  this complicated narrative, based on a novella by Heinrich Boell is about 18 minutes long.  Two of those minutes are devoted to the montage showing newspaper articles about re-arming the Reich.  MM's speech about Hinlanger-Hiss takes up about a minute and a half. And there are long sequences involving quotidian activities such as MM tying his tie, shaving, and participating ritualistically in the ceremonies associated with laying the cornerstone of the military academy.  Straub and his partner, Danielle Huillet (also his wife) were as red as could be -- card-carrying Communists if such a thing existed and, in public appearances, they have always been associated with a sort of Red Army faction/ Baader-Meinhof extremism.  Indeed, Straub dedicated his ultra-austere film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach to "the peace-loving people of North Vietnam", categorically supporting "their struggle against American Imperialism".  Age didn't mellow him -- after the 9-11 attack on America, Straub told a crowd of reporters at Cannes that "there would never be enough terrorists in the world so long as there is a United States."  These sorts of pronouncements have a hysterical, irrational edge and, indeed, the plot in Machorka-Muff is grotesque to the point of absurdity.  But Straub and Huillet were also great filmmakers and the bizarre aspects intrinsic to Machorka-Muff are concealed, or moderated, by the exceedingly sober, documentary-style efficiency of this little film.  Straub doesn't emphasize his polemical points -- in fact, he cuts away from the juiciest stuff, leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions.  Unlike a director like Fassbinder or Terry Gilliam in a political film like Brazil, Straub eschews anything like melodrama.  His camera placement is always fanatically precise:  for instance, the camera looks down on Machorka-Muff when he reads his speech about Hinlanger-Hiss' prowess in getting his men killed -- there is a slight tincture of sardonic condescension in the way the camera is placed.  Straub uses a similarly high angle looking down on the pathetic military band and the equally inauspicious-looking corner stone, a nasty little box of brick in a muddy field.  The movie is intentionally materialistic -- there is no suggestion of anything like psychology:  people act exactly as we expect them to act:  stereotypes represent a kind of truth.  There is tiny cascade of mismatched close-ups when Machorka-Muff sees his new uniform -- the montage suggests joy so great as to be just slightly unhinged.  The scenes involving the dream, shot in high-contrast black and white, are undemonstratively surreal -- but the peculiarity of these images isn't dwelled-upon:  it's all the more surrealist for being matter-of-fact --Machorka-Muff isn't an imaginative man and the dream is only slightly interesting to him.  Indeed, given the short 18 minute running time, nothing is really emphasized or dramatized.  The editing is so sharp and exact as to be percussive -- you can feel the cuts in your belly.  Straub's materialism is dramatized by his use of actual newspaper articles, lovingly cut into a montage that is a bit demanding for a non-German reading viewer -- I could read the texts but not completely since the cuts are too quick to allow the person watching to study the print carefully (and the subtitles intervene to also block out some of the words.)  Other avowedly materialist aspects of the film are the de-dramatized, clinically lit TV-style locations, the advertisements in shop windows where Machorka-Muff lingers, and extended real-time scenes of him knotting his neck-tie or shaving or standing motionlessly as he reads his bizarre speech and testimonial in Hinlanger-Hiss.  The camera also lingers on the modest little corner stone -- not much of a monument to a bloodthirsty warrior whose exploits cost his army 14,500 men.  In the 1960's and early 1970's, there was an uncompromising Leftist opposition in Germany -- this opposition was so fierce that some of its exponents in the film world (particularly Volker Schloendorff and Fassbinder) couldn't exactly denounce the Baader-Meinhof gang for its depredations.  When Heinrich Boell, who wrote the novella on which the film is based, was asked what sort of monument to the German war dead he would endorse, he said that he would like there to be a plaque simply reading "Shit".  This is pretty extreme and Machorka-Muff is a testament to these cultural forces. 

Chernobyl

Johan  Renck's Chernobyl, a six part mini-series on HBO is now at its half-life -- three episodes broadcast and three to go.  The program has an intelligent script, brilliant acting, and subject matter so compelling that it would fascinate if presented with stick figures animated against a featureless grey background.  In fact, the series is presented with elaborate location sequences (it's shot in Moscow and Lithuania), chaotic crowd scenes and the most horrific special effects that I have ever seen.  It's altogether persuasive, mostly disheartening, but shot through with sequences displaying almost unimaginable valor.  In effect, the film is a combat movie, similar in some ways to Ishiru Honda's first, and best, Godzilla movie (Godzilla, King of  the Monsters! Japan 1954, USA 1956  ) -- a group of brilliant and courageous scientists marshal forces to battle a terrifying radioactive beast, the melting Chernobyl power plant portrayed as a huge throne-like inferno pumping monstrous columns of radioactive smoke into the air.  At night, the ruptured core blasts a column of ionized atoms, a death ray of neutrons, like searchlight beam into the air.  As heedless school children play in playgrounds, birds murdered by the radiation drop out of the air to twitch dying on the sidewalks.

Clearly, there might be a tendency to overdramatize the calamity at Chernobyl and hype the catastrophe will ominous signs and portents.  Renck adopts the opposite strategy -- his film is forensically clinical:  he shows the nuclear accident as it appeared to those experiencing the explosion and melt-down in real time.  No one knows what is happening; everyone initially downplays the level of danger and bureaucrats work overtime to cover-up the calamity.  The film moves relentlessly along two parallel tracks -- first, there is the explosion, fire, and attempts at remediation; second, we witness the investigation of the causes of the explosion, moving toward a step-by-step reconstruction of what occurred to trigger the crisis.  After a brief, suitably depressing prologue in which one of the principals commits suicide, apparently several years after the melt-down, the series begins in the middle of the action, with alarms sounding at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and hapless workers struggling to ascertain what is happening.  The blast itself is de-dramatized:  we see a single flash from within the apartment of one of the firefighters who will be dispatched to the reactor with predictably deadly (and horrifying) effects.  The firefighter's pregnant wife, a robust-looking Slavic girl, bids him farewell -- in the background, through a window at the end of the domestic corridor, we see a momentary flash in the distance and, then, an eerie beam of ionized atoms forming a column over the plant.  The firefighters rush to the scene and find graphite shards -- a sign that the core has exploded, suffusing the site with deadly radiation.  People who touch the graphite immediately experience terrifying burns -- the skin on their hands sloughs off.  Some of the dying workers on the scene have purplish and black burns and the firefighters all experience effects that leave them with faces and torsos looking strangely sunburned.  The local Communist party insists that all is well and, when an old apparatchik gives a patriotic speech, apparently attempting to tamp down the radiation with cant, everyone applauds.  At the Kremlin, Gorbachev is persuaded that all will be well until the film's hero, a nuclear scientist, indicates that accounts from the scene convince him that the core has been blown open and is spewing radiation into the air.  Party officials denounce the scientist (played with morose desperation by the great Jared Harris) saying that radiation detectors at the scene don't read higher than 309 roentgens -- the dose of radiation you would get in a chest x-ray.  The scientist advises them that the radiation detectors that can be hand-carried into Chernobyl all max-out at 309 roentgens (that's where the scale ends) -- and, in fact, the true radiation readings turn out to be a thousand times that number.   With a life-long party official (played the equally dour Stellan Skarsgard), the scientist flies by helicopter to the reactor still belching a plume of deadly radioactive smoke.  Skarsgard's Communist official, at first, despises the scientist as defeatist, and, even, threatens to have him pitched out of the helicopter if he continues to insist that the explosion requires the evacuation of the nearby city Pritypak.  But Skarsgard is a hard-bitten realist and he comes to understand that the catastrophe is far worse than anyone thought.  The city is evacuated and, this is the point when the film starts to flare into a sort of awful grandeur -- the show's progression to another level is encapsulated by the big crowd scenes of people getting on buses and, then, a tracking shot of an abandoned German shepherd desperately racing through the crowds of demoralized but stoic Ukrainians filing onto city buses.  There is a desperate effort to keep the melting core from contacting groundwater -- something that would poison millions of people.  At first, we see three workers up to their waists in lethal water turning off the valves that provide coolant to the plant -- these men know that they dead men walking as soon as they accept the assignment.   Three other men plunge into the darkness under the plant wearing anti-radiation suits with Geiger counters clattering out warnings -- they have to locate some kind of valve in the pitch darkness and shut it off.   This sequence is exceptionally terrifying.  Later, hundreds of coal miners are brought to the site to dig a tunnel under the core so that concrete slabs can be poured to arrest the melt-down.  The tunnel is terribly hot and, since fans would merely blow around the radiation, the miners work stark naked -- a surrealist image in which the vulnerability of the naked bodies effects the viewer in counterpoint with harrowing scenes in the Moscow hospital where the burned plant workers are literally melting into pools of oozing gore.  This sequence, very difficult to watch, involves the stoic pregnant firefighter's wife and Emily Watson, stout and dour, playing a nuclear scientist who interviews the dying men to find out what happened at the plant.  (She's the third protagonist in the film.)  The dying firefighters and plant workers are blind and their lips swollen up like balloons, bodies entirely flayed -- it's as if the men have been turned inside-out.  From time to time, the program shows tense meetings in the Kremlin.  Here the imagery is also borderline surreal (although perhaps accurate) -- the men confer in an ornate colonnaded corridor that ends with the famous and huge picture by Ilya Repin of Ivan the Terrible holding the son that he has just beaten to death in his arms (I see no evidence that the painting has ever actually been in the Kremlin.)  At the end of the third episode, the caskets containing the deliquesced bodies of the firefighters and nuclear reactor technicians are enclosed in lead sarcophaguses, lined-up in a pit and, then, buried in concrete -- we see the pour of fresh concrete gradually lapping around and, then, covering the lead tombs.

The movie has deteriorated, mildewed look -- the Soviet provincial cities are dispiriting and everyone is constantly swilling down vodka.  There is a palpable sense of doom investing the film's images -- no one looks like a movie star:  Harris, Skarsgard, and Emily Watson, all look flabby, with pasty waxen complexions.  The miners are burly with powerful shoulders and buttocks, but they are also mostly overweight.  The series is matter-of-fact, generally clinical, and open-eyed about the horrible aspects of the Soviet system -- when Emily Watson's character denounces the nurses for allowing the pregnant firefighter's wife to enter the plastic shroud where her husband is dying to hold his decomposing hand, the KGB is called and she is promptly thrown into an underground torture chamber.  She's quickly released but only because of her importance to the technical inquiry.  The various bureaucrats all have their rationales for maintaining secrecy and many of them are very reasonable-sounding and, even, well-spoken.   The KGB chieftain is sweetly eloquent -- he describes the secret police as a cozy "circle of accountability".  Although the cover-up and negligence is appalling, there are no real villains.  The film has an oddly uplifting aspect -- throughout the picture, we see people sacrificing themselves so that others can be saved.  The miners, for instance, are a tough and sardonic lot -- they can't be motivated by patriotic speeches or party-loyalty or threats of violence:  when soldiers point guns at them, they invite the troops to fire, coldly remarking that enough of them will survive to beat the soldiers to death.  But when the true stakes of their assignment is revealed -- protecting the nation's water supply from being poisoned -- they unquestioningly agree to dig the tunnel under the crumbling nuclear power plant.  While this is underway, the naked boss approaches Skarsgard and asks him if the miners "will be taken care of."  Skarsgard has previously characterized the miners as "men who work in the dark and who see everything."  "I don't know," Skarsgard tells them.  Without a word, the mine boss returns to his deadly tunnel.  Marshal Zhukov, or one of the other Red Army field marshals during World War II, used to remark before a battle that "there will be many heroes made" (meaning that some units would be sacrificed in suicidal attacks).  Chernobyl shows many heroes and the horrifying cost of this heroism. 

On several occaions

Swing Time

Male vanity is a covert theme, although concealed in plain view, in George Stevens' musical Swing Time, a 1936 vehicle for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  At the outset of the film, Lucky (Fred Astaire) is deterred from attending his own wedding by a hoax -- one of his fellow hoofers tells him that his pants must have cuffs to be stylish.  Of course, this is untrue, but Lucky sends the offending garment to a tailor to have cuffs installed and, then, lounges around with the other male dancers without his trousers, playing cards, while the pastor and bride wait woefully in an upscale mansion a few miles away. Of course, this thwarts the wedding.  At the end of the movie, a Latin lover's planned marriage to Ginger Rogers' character, Penny, is thwarted when Lucky tells the debonair fellow that his pants need to be tailored with cuffs -- thus sending his rival on a wild goose chase so that he, also, misses his own wedding.  The amoral moral of this aspect of the film is that it's more important to look stylish and sharp than to attend your own wedding -- notwithstanding the tearful bride waiting at the altar.  This theme is demonstrated early in the film in a sequence in which Lucky woos Penny by taking dance lessons from her -- Astaire has to pretend to be miserably incompetent as a dancer.  But this is simply beyond Astaire -- he demonstrates his incompetency not by stepping on Penny's feet or moving out-of-synch with then music:  rather, he swirls Penny in circles and, then, balletically falls to the ground, swooning like a wounded swan.  Astaire's vanity wouldn't let him look clumsy -- when he stumbles and falls, pulling down his partner, he does so beautifully.

Swing Time is a cheerfully anarchic RKO Radio Picture, lavishly produced, the kind of movie that imagines Manhattan as a secular paradise-on-earth.  European surrealism of this era was all despair -- melting clocks and decomposition; by contrast, American surrealism is a merry venture, mostly visible in movie musicals from the thirties:  everyone is unrealistically happy, energetic and, even when suffering plot reversals, wildly optimistic.  Lucky, a dancer, moonlights as a gambler and the film posits his ability to raise large sums of money on demand as required by the plot -- he simply conjures cash out of card games and roulette wheels.  Lucky's sidekick,  Pop (Victor Moore),  is a magician who also specializes in card tricks -- if need be, he can cheat fortunes out of the villains who are, generally, far too amiable to deserve that appellation.  Pop, Lucky's sidekick, is played by a bizarre-looking actor -- the man has a protuberant rump and is shaped, more or less, like a grinning fetus.  He seems to have a hydrocephalic head that makes him a dead ringer for Claude Debussy.  (This fetal-looking Debussy has the sort of features that camera's love -- one moment he looks positively hideous, the next instant, he grins at the camera and seems to be almost movie-star handsome.  He's completely fascinating and his dumpy, shapeless body is the perfect counterpoint for Astaire's suave and rail-thin Gestalt.)  Ginger Rogers as Penny, Lucky's love interest is more than equal to Astaire, so wonderfully self-confident and gorgeous, that she can turn away from Lucky in a heart-beat if he disappoints her, effortlessly securing a marriage proposal from Ricky Romero, the dark and outrageously handsome Latin lover and band leader who is Astaire's rival.  Like Lucky, Penny has a side-kick, Mabel, a gin-soaked divorcee whose role is to supply the sardonic and cynical wise-cracks that comment on the action -- of course, she is also on hand as a comic love-interest for that fantastical creature, Pop. 

The plot is vestigial.  Lucky's colleagues, hating to loose their poker buddy, hoax him out of attending his own wedding.  Lucky's fiancée is the daughter of a wealthy man, a banker of the classically bourgeois kind featured in films of this sort (played by Eric Blore who specialized in these parts).  The banker tells Lucky that he can marry his daughter if he goes to New York and earns $25,000.  Lucky plays poker, makes a lot of money, but this cash is taken from him by his gambling buddies -- he has bet with them that the marriage will take place but, of course, it doesn't.  Lucky with Pop hitches a train to New York -- he's still wearing his wedding tuxedo, tails, and has a top hat.  In New York, Lucky encounters Penny, a tough, resourceful working girl.  Pop steals a quarter from her -- they have literally no money.  When Penny complains to the cops, there's a Brechtian moment when a police officer, surveying Lucky's natty attire admits that his job is to protect the upper class from people like this young woman -- she is, in effect, treated like some kind of rapacious streetwalker.  Lucky is unhappy that Pop snatched the girl's quarter and so he tracks her to her place of employment, a crooked dance instruction business.  There he tries to endear himself to her by asking for a free lesson.  When the smarmy boss tries to fire her, Lucky and Penny perform an improvised pas de deux, the first of the show's dances.  Obviously, Lucky and Penny perform spectacularly with one another.  They audition as dancers with Ricky Romero, a Latino band leader, who performs in immense and lavish ballrooms high in a skyscraper overlooking Central Park.  There's a breathtaking scene in which Lucky and Penny look through a wall of windows down at the park, snow glittering outside as it falls through the city lights.  Of course, Penny and Lucky fall in love.  But, Lucky deputizes Pop to keep him from showing his affection for Penny -- he's still committed to earning the $25,000 to marry his fiancée, the banker's daughter.  The two couples (Pop and Penny's friend, Mabel, Lucky and Penny) go to an abandoned roadhouse, buried in the snow.  Penny is obviously now in love with Lucky and hurt when Lucky rebuffs her advances.  Back in the city, Penny and Lucky perform atop a skyscraper in a majestic nightclub, The Silver Sandal.  Astaire performs a virtuoso routine called "Bojangles" -- it commences with showgirls rotating a huge black peanut with fat human lips.  The peanut turns out to be the soles of the shoes of an colossal African-American giant -- Bojangles.  Fred Astaire is at the vertex of the giant's legs, in minstrel-style blackface (he spreads his arms in declamatory fashion like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer).  Astaire dances for six or so minutes, tapping his way through ever more elaborate and hallucinatory sets -- in the end, he dances with three  huge shadows, mimicking their movements, until the shadows can no longer keep up with his increasingly intricate and accelerating  dancing.  The shadows bow out, having become fully autonomous -- Black giants like the figure that began the sequence.  The film reverts, a bit wistfully, to its narrative. There are some misunderstandings.  The fiancée shows up at an inopportune time.  Penny gets engaged to Ricky Romero. But, as they say, all's well that end's well. 

I'm not competent to comment on the dance scenes.  People knowledgeable about this subject generally express awe at the beauty and complexity of the dancing -- it looks to me like standard dance moves (waltz, polka, ballet) that are adorned with high speed tap dancing embellishments.  Stevens use a crane and dolly to shoot the dance sequences in sweeping continuous sequence shots -- there are very few cuts in any of the dance scenes.   The Bojangles number, which is, at least, six minutes long is structured into no more than three shots.  The sets are astonishing:  topless prisms of translucent alabaster, ebony dance floors that are like vast black mirrors, cantilevered steps leading up the sides of vast glacial-white silos topped with dancing girls in ostrich plumes.  None of these sets seem to have any ceilings -- the space is suggested to be like an Art Deco cathedral, soaring and majestic.  Hotel suites are white on white with white settees against white walls where white end-tables support white phones and white lamps.  One set for a dance scene looks vaguely like Schindler's famous set for the appearance of the Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute -- scintillating stars arch up into a pale grey and glowing void.  Ginger Rogers is fantastically beautifully and dressed in timeless, elegant gowns.  Sometimes, Fred Astaire, with his otherworldly bulbous eyes, looks like Stan Laurel -- he even imitates Laurel in one of his dances.  The dialogue is fast, whip-smart, and a little like the repartee in a Marx Brothers movie.  At the New Amsterdam, an abandoned country tavern buried in deep snow, Penny's sidekick tries to distract Pop from supervising the lovers, Penny and Lucky.  She says:  "Come on, let me show you where we once fished through ice."  Pop replies:  "But I thought you said you only came out here in the summer."  She responds:  "That's right.  Let me show you where we didn't fish through the ice." 

Veep (final season)

If any additional evidence were required (and it is not) probative of the exponential rate of deterioration in American political discourse, HBO's Veep is exhibit A.  Although I don't entirely remember the comedy series' first season, I think that the titular character, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, played her part, VP Selena Meyer, a bit like a starry-eyed, if exceedingly foul-mouthed, Mary Tyler Moore -- she was a little naïve, an attractive earnest woman surrounded by vicious political operatives of the opposite sex, always willing to use her physical appeal, if necessary, but, generally, pragmatic and well-meaning.  The real villains were the manipulative men around her:  sordid campaign managers and press secretaries, venal donors, and, of course, a menagerie of narcissistic, wholly self-serving politicians.  There were some fairly dark episodes (in one show, Selena has an abortion and, then, claims her young female factotum, Amy, was the one who needed the procedure), but, by and large, the audience had the sense that Selena was ineffectual but not evil.  The show's final season strips away any illusions that the audience might have about Selena's character and motives:  she is shown to be a destructive, wholly unprincipled monster, a sort of female demon nakedly embodying the will to power and nothing else.  This is dispiriting but, in accord, with our dysfunctional national politics -- Donald Trump is affirmatively evil and engages in criminal conduct; since Selena Meyer represents a caricatured female version of President Trump, then, of course she must also be flamboyantly evil and viciously criminal.  Her character has hardened and her potty-mouth is now overflowing with extravagant and horrific vituperation. (The leading lady has been ill and, although this ungallant to note, Dreyfuss looks old and gaunt in some of the episodes -- her features are sharp as a razor.)  The show's dialogue has always been highly stylized, a torrent of rococo insults and degrading characterizations of other politicians and, of course, the body politic in general -- Meyer customarily refers to her electorate as "morons" or worse.  But, in these final shows, the level of invective achieves an almost Dante-esque fury -- vicious verbal assaults, including Selena spectacularly humiliating the mistress of an opposing politician, reach a thunderous level; the verbal cruelty amounts to soul-murder.  Is any of this funny?  Not really.  Rather, the show aspires to a kind of lacerating Swiftian satire, not so much comical as simply horrifying. 

In broad terms, the half-hour episodes in the final series involve Selena's quest to be nominated for President by her party.  (Her actual party affiliation is unclear -- it's simply assumed that neither party has any real distinguishing characteristics and each are simply vehicles for the ambition of their monstrous political operatives.)  Selena's lust for the nomination erodes what little remains of her moral compass.  She colludes with the Chinese who hack into the vote in North Carolina and trades Tibet for Peking's support.  In the final episode involving "horse trading" for nominating convention delegates, she agrees to abolish gay marriage and supports fracking on government lands in exchange for the votes of Western and Intermountain delegates.  On a trip to Oslo to accept a secondary Nobel peace prize (based on her alleged support of Tibet), she inadvertently reveals that her regime has committed various war crimes with drone-assisted missile strikes.  The International Criminal Court at the Hague issues a writ for  her arrest and she has to seek refuge in the Finnish embassy -- the Finnish Prime Minister, an attractive hyper-competitive blonde, apparently is lesbian and lusts after Selena.  When the American public learns that Selena has killed innumerable Afghans and Pakistanis with drone strikes, she surges in the polls -- Americans like cruelty (as witness Trump's success).  With the assistance of an actual Soviet era war-criminal and torturer from Eastern Europe, Selena escapes the embassy and while flying back to the United States learns to her dismay that her popularity is now waning -- gun-camera footage of the drone strike on the Afghan wedding shows that the bombing also killed an elephant and the public denounces her for murdering the animal (not the people).  Her opponents are no better.  Her chief rival, Jonah, is an idiot from New Hampshire, a swine who sexually harasses everyone around him, is married to his own sister, and panders to the anti-vaccine crowd.  When this candidate discovers that algebra was an invention of the Arabs, he denounces mathematics as "terrorist math."  This earns him a huge following and, when a real terrorist shooter is revealed to be a trigonometry teacher, Jonah rises spectacularly in the polls. Selena has recruited for her VP a hapless, policy-minded Iraq war veteran whose legs were destroyed by an IED.  (The show indulges in a series of fantastically cruel jokes about this man's disability -- this is cringe comedy at its most extreme and the show's screenwriters apparently feel licensed to indulge themselves in this sort of thing because the "witticisms" are uttered by characters defined as amoral and criminal.)  On the basis of political expediency, Selena makes the wounded war vet nominate her for President -- then, she betrays him by naming Jonah as her running mate.  In an earlier episode, Selena has been complicit in the murder of her ex-husband, a philanderer who has periodically appeared in the show to blackmail her with various requests for political favors and money.  (Despite his disloyalty, Selena, who is sexually promiscuous, sometimes sleeps with him.)  Among all of the self-serving and vain characters, one figure stands out for his unimpeachable loyalty to Selena -- this is Gary, Selena's "body man":  he carries her purse with make-up, tampons, various sorts of pills and narcotics and remains pathetically loyal to his boss right up the show's penultimate shot.  Selena rewards Gary's unconditional love with insults and abuse.  At the show's climax, after Gary has just put on her lipstick, Selena delivers her acceptance speech -- she has pinned the murder of  her ex-husband on Gary and, while she is speaking, we see FBI agents hauling him away.  (At the end of the show, at Selena's funeral 25 years after the events chronicled in the series, the surviving characters all mock Gary for limping up to her casket and putting her favorite lipstick on top of its lid -- he's been in Federal prison for 20 years.)  The final episode focuses not just on bad conduct but something worse:  betrayal.  Selena betrays the Dalai Lama who is counting on her to free Tibet; she betrays her lesbian daughter who is an advocate for gay marriage; she betrays her most loyal supporter, Gary, and, in fact, has him sent to prison.  In the White House, we see her agreeing to use food as a weapon at the behest of the Israeli prime minister.  For a moment, the camera lingers on her face before she takes the call from the Israeli leader -- she has a look of blank and total despair on her face, but this quickly turns to resolve and she's perky on the phone:   of course, the Palestinians are always "whining", she agrees, and have to be punished by being systematically starved.  In the coda, we see excerpts from Selena Meyer's funeral -- she's buried at her Presidential library, a vaginal-themed building to celebrate that she was the first female president.  The pallbearers are confounded by the vulva-shaped entrance to the mausoleum and can't get the phallic casket inside:  "It seems to be too tight," the media commentator says, "They're having trouble getting inside...oh, there...it's slipped right in."  Unfortunately for Selena,  Tom Hanks has died on the same day as her funeral and the air waves are occupied with tributes to the actor. 

I don't know what to make of the show.  One principle is that the more incompetent the character, the higher they aspire and the more successful they become.  A nitwit African-American aid replaces a dog as the mayor of Lurleen, Iowa and, then, by a series of improbable events, rises to become lieutenant governor, then, governor of Iowa and, at last, the President of the United States.  There are nasty wisecrack about places like the Carolinas, Iowa, and Montana.  In the final season, one of Selena's operatives, Amy (now working for Jonah), has an abortion and the show strives to engineer the most tasteless and vile jokes about the process and the vacuum equipment used.  The jokes are simply hateful -- they don't make any political point as far as I can see and they aren't directly relevant to any theme in the show.  Once again, I suppose the show's writers would justify these jokes as being indicative of the soullessness of the characters uttering them -- but someone had to write these jokes and, presumably, felt they were entertaining or comical enough to include them in show.  So the claim that the jokes are made by vicious characters and shouldn't be attributed to the scriptwriters is a little hollow.  Someone is taking way too much pleasure in making exuberantly racist, sexist, and fascist jokes.  The show's descent into pure political and moral nihilism is compelling, but it's not funny.
   

A Long Day's Journey into Night

A Long Day's Journey into Night is Chinese director Bi Gan's second feature film, completed in 2018 and shown at the Walker Art Center in early May 2019.  The film is about two-hours and ten minutes long and exceedingly difficult.  I don't pretend to understand the film and can't accurately summarize it's progress -- the film has a dream-like plot that can't really be paraphrased.  In my estimation, the picture develops pictorial themes and techniques that Bi Gan demonstrated in his remarkable first picture, Kaili Blues -- and the film is set in Kaili, an apparently remote coal-mining and river town in something like theAppalachia of mainland China.  The film's milieu is similar to that shown in Kaili Blues -- we seem to be dealing with alienated ex-convicts, shiftless young people, and sinister gangsters.  Kaili Blues is a far superior film in my view because it has a form that remains tethered to some extent in the real world and recognizably human characters.  A Long Day's Journey into Night (the title is perverse and the film has no connection whatsoever to Eugene O'Neil's play) is most similar to David Lynch's almost unwatchably strange and tedious Inland Empire.  Lynch used the techniques and horror-film  imagery in his experimental Inland Empire as a springboard to create the ineffably bizarre and fascinating Twin Peaks reboot.  I think Lynch's series will be one of the decisive works of art in the 21st century and, surely, the program is one of history's great films.  Therefore, I am confident that Bi Gan, who is very young (probably about 32) will make remarkable films in the future.  Long  Day's Journey... is dull and completely confusing, but it is a unique experience and, I think, a harbinger of great work to come. 

Like Kaili Blues, A Long Days Journey... is constructed in two roughly equal parts.  The first hour involves a protagonist who comes to Kaili to investigate his father's death. (I think the man's called Lo Hong Wu -- if I can trust notes scribbled on the back of a brochure in the supernal darkness of the WAC theater; I'll call him Wu for short --  although he really functions as an unnamed, inexplicable presence in the film, a center around which the film's dreamlike action revolves.)  Wu's father, a petty gangster named Wildcat, has been found in a mineshaft, apparently murdered.  Initially, the film resembles a strangulated version of a film noir mystery -- Wu encounters a femme fatale who seems to have been implicated in his father's murder.  (The movie uses genre elements much like Bela Tarr's equally unsuccessful The Man from London adapted from a crime novel by Georges Simenon -- you sense the mystery movie components cubistically fractured and sort of randomly distributed throughout a picture that really has nothing to so with the genre that it invokes.)  The femme fatale seems to have had an affair with Wildcat.  It's not clear to me but she may have used Wildcat to kill her husband, the keeper of a disastrously decrepit hotel, the Pangmei Inn, a ghostly place where water drips and a big black German shepherd (as in Tarkovsky's Stalker) paces around uneasily.  The woman (or there may be two women or even more) was like Scheherazade:  when she ran out of money she earned her keep telling the hotel owner stories until he married her.  She entices someone (probably Wildcat) to kill the hotel owner and, then, she (perhaps) has someone kill Wildcat and dump him in a mine-shaft.  Wu has a "green book" that (perhaps) tells the story of two doomed lovers.  The two doomed lovers may be Wildcat and the femme fatale or, possibly, the femme fatale and the doomed Pangmei Hotel innkeeper.  (A female convict tells Wu that she and the femme fatale robbed a house and stole the "green book.")  The lovers meet for trysts in an abandoned and flooded house where water is pouring down from the ceiling incessantly.  Sometimes, Wu and the femme fatale have encounters in a greenish, gloomy tunnel.  In one scene, we see someone flailing around in a car -- it's either a sex scene or a murder:  we can't tell which because the vehicle is passing through a car-washer and covered with froth and soap -foam.  People go on train rides in deserted cars.  Wu claims to have seen his dead father's ghost on the train -- we don't see anything.  Rain is predicted -- more rain since it is wet in every single scene in the entire film.  There are mudslides.  Sometimes, when someone is talking we hear an ominous low rumble of a mud slide, but we never see one.  The incessant rain, mirror effects using specular surfaces that are corroded or covered with condensate, dark dripping corridors, detritus under the surface of turbid, polluted water, and a shot taken directly from Stalker (a train rumbles by causing a glass of liquid to inch it's way off the edge of a dirty table) all invoke Tarkovsky.  But, other aspects of the film come directly from David Lynch's movies.  There's a torture scene in which a nattily dressed gangster sings karaoke to a man suspended from an overhead pipe -- this is like Dean Stockwell singing the Sandman song in Blue Velvet.  (Who is being tortured and why I couldn't decipher.)  A Long Day's Journey... is the darkest picture I have ever seen -- the viewer literally can't decipher what is happening in half the shots.   This is clearly intentional since Bi Gan showed himself a master of clearly lit and expository landscapes and city locations in Kaili Blues -- the director doesn't want you to be able to see what is happening.  And this for the entire two-hour and ten minutes film.

After about one hour, the hero staggers into a bombed-out looking courtyard where some flames are flickering in barrels.  People who like zombies are scattered around.  Wu is looking for the femme fatale who appears and disappears mysteriously throughout the movie.  A woman (who looks just like the mystery lady) tells Wu that the femme fatale will be singing "just before dawn" in a dive dimly lit at the other end of the courtyard.  (And, then, joint will be demolished.)  The hero goes to a movie theater to kill time.  The film that he is watching is a 3D movie and, when he dons his dark glasses, this is a sign to the audience to put on the 3D goggles that viewers were handed at the door when they entered the auditorium.   The movie projected on the screen is called A Long Day's Journey into Night -- the title appears one hour into the film.  The rest of the movie consists of a continuous gargantuan sequence shot, seemingly without cuts (I think Bi Gan cheats a couple time but it's so dark you can't tell).  This movie within a movie involves Wu finding himself in a dungeon-like room.  He meets a boy wearing a minotaur's skull and plays him in a Ping-Pong game.  The boy takes Wu to the edge of a huge amphitheater-like declivity and puts him in a sort of miner's bucket.  The bucket then descends several hundred feet to place where various shadowy figures are moving about.  It's a Karaoke contest and the woman Wu is seeking is supposed to appear last, just as the sun is rising at dawn. (We hear roosters crowing continuously during this last hour.)  Wu plays pool with a woman who looks like the femme fatale.  She is older however and she ushers Wu deeper into the huge cavity -- it's like a hell with concentric circles each deeper than the last.  The woman takes Wu to where a man is confined in a cage.  The woman says that this is her lover.  They quarrel.  Wu opens the cage and the older woman and man depart in a white pickup truck -- I have the sense that the man is Wildcat.  Before they leave, the woman says that she and the man in the cage enjoyed many romantic trysts at a palace-house where the roof leaked.  Wu goes back to the Karaoke contest.  He encounters the mysterious woman in the dressing room.  He gives her a watch, plucked from the cage where Wildcat was trapped -- "it's a symbol of eternity" he tells her.  She lights a Roman candle and inserts it in a flower vase in her dressing room -- "It's a symbol of evanescence," she says.  Then, she and Wu use a magic Ping-Pong paddle (I kid you not) to fly over the ramshackle brick compound in the hell-amphitheater to the palatial house where the lovers once met.  But it's all burned out, just a ruined hull.  The mysterious woman vanishes.  Wu climbs out of the lower parts of this hell to where the Karaoke show is underway.  There's some robotically performed songs ala Blue Velvet and, then, Wu goes back into the dressing room -- the camera focuses on the Roman Candle still flickering and casting sparks and, then, the film ends.  The last 59 minutes can be explained, more or less, as a sequence of events but I don't have a clear concept what it means or why these things occur -- clearly, the movie within the movie, possibly Wu's dream, incorporates elements from the previous hour of the film.  For instance, the femme fatale has asked Wu to get her a pomelo fruit.  But it's winter and there are no pomelos to be found.  In one of the amphitheaters in the black subterranean hell, a horse suddenly emerges, materializing out of  awall -- the horse is carrying a load of fruit including pomelo.  Wildcat's death has something to do with apples -- Wildcat was working as a street vendor of apples and his inventory rotted when he vanished.  In the final hour, the hero seems to be continuously chomping on an apple.  These correlations are obvious-- the apple seems to suggest Eve's temptation of Adam and connects to the femme fatale's role in triggering the murder of the Innkeeper and Wildcat.  But other aspects of the hour-long final sequence are hard to interpret and, perhaps, can't be interpreted at all.  Furthermore, if the film was dark before the last hour, it is impenetrably gloomy after the audience dons the heavily tinted 3D goggles -- several times, I lifted the goggles, which really did little but blur and darken the image, and found that the screen was much clearer and better lit without the glasses.  But you are supposed to wear the glasses and some parts of the last sequence did feature very low-key and unimpressive 3D effects.   The last hour is so dark that I often couldn't tell what I was seeing.  (This final hour-long nightmare sequence is similar to the last ninety minutes of Inland Empire in which Laura Dern enters a black maze and literally melts away, sometimes turning into a doppelganger or a haze of electrons and encountering other monstrous apparitions -- she can't get back to the well-lit audition where the sequence began and the film ends with her trapped forever in Lynch's hellish fun-house.)

Ban Gi's movie is a failure and close to unwatchable.  But it takes huge chances.  The wager, which doesn't pay off, is enormous. 

Kaili Blues

Apparently, part of China looks very much like Appalachia:  muscular green rivers flow in deep green gorges.  Towns occupy river valleys and extend for dilapidated miles between the river and the steep, shaggy bluffs.  The economy seems based on coal, but no one seems to have a job.  Young men hang out in squalid pool-halls and ride motor-scooters that don't start reliably.  There are even hillbillies of a particularly rustic sort, the Miao ethnic group -- people once renowned for their ability to play "Lusheng pipes", although this skill has been mostly abandoned:  the kids favor second-hand electric guitars with battered speakers, traveling to gigs crammed into the back of old, dilapidated pick-up trucks.  Train tracks snake along the river bottoms, frequently passing through long tunnels and there is an unsteady-looking suspension bridge spanning the bright green river.  The landscape is like the terrain around Pittsburgh or Wheeling,West Virginia -- no one seems to have any money or any hope.  This is the place where Bi Gan's Kaili Blues is set, filmed with such intensity that you can almost smell the sub-tropical rot and squalor.  Released in 2015, Kaili Blues is a remarkable debut feature film for the young director -- I think he was 25 when the picture was made.  The movie is an intricate puzzle picture:  on second viewing, the broad contours of the enterprise are visible, but I'm still not clear what the movie is supposed to mean or, even, if the concept of thematic subject matter has any relevance to the picture at all.  Throughout the movie, a voice intones poems, all of them written by Bi Gan, although attributed to the character named Chen in the picture.  The short poems are surrealist in nature, very densely written, and hard to follow when spoken in voice-over.  I'm not certain that careful study of this verse would yield any clearly articulable meaning -- rather, the poems seem comprised of atmospheric mists of words, striking evanescent images that don't exactly cohere in terms of any meaning that can be paraphrased.  The film operates in a similar manner -- the images, often astonishing, are organized according to certain principles involving repetition, a sort of visual rhyming.  But whether these images, taken together, coalesce into a meaning that can be paraphrased is unclear to me.  The movie is visually beautiful and contains striking sequences and, so, it is pleasant enough to study.  But, at the outset, Bi Gan offers a warning:  there is a long citation from the Diamond Sutra that tells us that Buddha understands the thought of all beings because, in effect, there is no thought; this is because the thought that is past can not be retrieved, the thought that is future is not available to be grasped, and the thought of the present always eludes us in the moment.  Obviously, this quote is an admonition to the viewer.

Kaili Blues presents more of a situation than a plot although the film is filled with occurrences of various kinds.  (An example of these occurrences is the periodic appearance of white dog owned by someone nicknamed Pisshead -- in an early scene, the dog warily circles a fire-pit on a terrace at a medical clinic.  The scene is bathed in deep colors and the orange of the fire is more orange than anything you've ever seen.) A sad older man named Chen works at a clinic.  At first, we see him as a patient and there is a suggestion that he is infected somehow.  Later, we find that Chen is a physician of sorts himself despite a background that includes nine years in prison.  Through bits of dialogue, we come to understand that Chen has a half-brother nicknamed Crazy Face.  Crazy Face has a son named Weiwei.  The little boy is neglected, left alone at home with the admonition that he should do his homework.  Chen is close to Weiwei and concerned that Crazy Face is going to sell the child to a local gangster called the Monk.  When Weiwei vanishes, Chen decides to go to a place called Zhenyuan where the Monk has supposedly taken the boy.  Chen also agrees to deliver a message from the elderly lady doctor with whom he practices.  "Before the Cultural Revolution", she says that she had a lover named Lin Airen.  She has lost touch with this man, but believes he lives in Zhenyuan.  Chen agrees to deliver a shirt to Lin Airen -- it's a private joke between the lady doctor and Lin Airen:  they agreed that whoever left Kaili first would be given a shirt by the other person.  Through some half-overheard conversation, we learn that Monk owed money to another gangster.  The other gangster cut off Monk's son's hand and, then, buried the child alive.  Curiously, Chen accepts the justice of burying the boy alive, but can't reconcile himself with cutting off the boy's hand.  It seems that Chen may have taken revenge on the gangster who mutilated and killed Monk's son -- apparently, this is why he spent nine years in jail. (The jail was a coal mine where workers were routinely beaten.)  Chen and his half-brother Crazy Face quarrel over the upkeep on their mother's grave.  There is a house in dispute between them.  We learn that Chen's wife died when he was in prison.  Then, at about thirty minutes into the film, the title appears:  Kaili Blues. 

The first part of the film is clearly and beautifully shot and makes a certain kind of elliptical sense.  We hear poems on the sound track recited by  Chen and there are strange images that can't exactly be reconciled to anything in the narration.  A train seems to sweep by Crazy Face's hovel, projected on curtains -- it's not clear if this is a real train or some sort of hallucination.  Chen dreams of his mother's slippers drifting away under water.  (His mother abandoned him when he was a small boy and he was raised on the streets of Kaili -- the slipper sinking into the green river seems an image of the boy's abandonment).  In a pool hall, there's a red table onto which water seems to pour -- an obvious homage to Tarkovsky and an image that signifies that what we are seeing is a memory.  There's a tunnel in which a banana vendor pushes a cart sometimes toward the camera and, sometimes, away into the shadows. 

Chen takes a train to a reservoir in the mountains.  A man who was formerly a gangster drives Chen down to a place named Dangmai.  (It seems to be a sort of roadside café.)   Chen remembers prison and tells an anecdote about how he was beaten over a misunderstanding that now seems comical to him.  A wild man seems to be out and about.  (We learn this by a radio account)  People are terrorized by the wild man.  Before he vanished, Weiwei was afraid of the creature and thought it would attack him at home.  The wild man has accosted a motorist and caused a terrible accident in which a bit of Batik tapestry was damaged.  (There is a later inserted shot showing odd images on the Batik).  At Dangmai, we see a young man with a motorscooter with blue buckets strapped to its back.  A pretty young girl tries to get a ride with the young man but he can't get the motorscooter to start -- throughout the movie no one can get their vehicles to reliably start and there are periodic power outages.  The scene at Dangmai initiates an extended take that lasts for 45 minutes, a single shot somewhat like Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark -- but, if anything, even more complex and arduous.  The shot is made with a sort of fish-eye lens that slightly distorts the image, blurring it a little at the sides, and involves several extended motor-scooter rides and, then, tracking shots in Zhenyuan, a place that looks more or less indistinguishable from the wretched Kaili.  Sometimes, the camera deserts Chen to follow other figures, including the pretty young girl who turns out to be a hair stylist and would-be tour-guide -- periodically, she recites facts and figures about Kaili, including annual rainfall, temperature range, and the size of the city (she is rehearsing for the tours she hopes to lead).  The sequence shot includes an interlude with Miao people, an impromptu concert on the street in which Chen sings (poorly) a song called "Little Jasmine Flower".   At one point, the pretty young hair dresser, Yang Yang, walks through some alleys, takes a ferry across the river (about a 100 yard ride over a turbulent-looking green river).  She buys a whirligig and, then, crosses the river again on a swinging bridge to attend the Miao rock 'n roll show where Chen is singing the pop tune.  The boy with the blue buckets strapped to his bike takes Chen back up the hill to Dangmai and the shot ends where it began -- 45 minutes later.  On the way back up the hill, Chen says that "It's like a dream" and asks the boy driving the motorbike for his name.  The boy says that he's Weiwei, now grown to be a teenager.  Chen goes to a place where a wholesale banana vendor has a kind of mansion standing over what seem to be sugar cane fields and bamboo thickets.  He learns that Weiwei is safe with the banana wholesaler who has bought the boy from Crazy Face and is raising him.  The banana vendor may also be a watch repairman.  This correlates to earlier scenes in which we have learned that Weiwei is obsessed with clocks, draws them on walls, and inks them on his wrist.  In one uncanny shot, we watch a hand-drawn watch seem to tell time by a shadow cast from where it is nailed to a wall. I don't know if the banana wholesaler and the watch repairman are one or two people. (The people's faces all look alike to me because, of course, they are Chinese and so parts of the film were unintentionally confusing simply because I couldn't tell the people apart).  It seems that Chen sights Weiwei as a little boy, looking at him through binoculars and, at one point, we see a procession of Miao people marching single file and playing hooked instruments that must be Lusheng pipes. Chen learns that the lady doctor's boyfriend has died about a year earlier.  He leaves Zhengyuen on a train --  the train looks like the ghost train we saw passing Crazy Face's hovel an hour earlier. Chen falls asleep and the move suddenly ends. 

The summary is clearer than the film and I will probably have to watch it several more times to understand all of the intricate cross-references between the single take tracking shot in Zhenyuan and the opening hour-long sequence in Kaili.  The long tracking shot is a virtuosic display that, in fact, creates an indescribable sensation of disorientation and somehow seems to suspend time -- it's clear that the tracking shot somehow takes place in several different times (Weiwei is either a little boy or a teenager) and implicates different motifs from the Kaili scenes.  Clearly, the film is similar to Tarkovsky's Stalker -- the hero enters a kind of "zone" when he leaves Dangmai on the back of the motorcycle.  Time is "sculpted" to use the Tarkovsky phrase in the long tracking shot -- Chen seems to slip from one time to another encountering earlier (and possibly later) versions of characters that we have seen earlier.  Curiously enough, the film reminds me most directly of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo's unutterably mysterious short novel Pedro Paramo -- in that book, a man is sent by his mother on a mission to the town where he was born and raised.  He reaches the town and interacts with its inhabitants and, then, gradually comes to understand that the town is abandoned, its buildings deserted and falling apart, and that the people that he encounters are all ghosts stubbornly clinging to vestiges of their tragic past.  Kaili Blues has much the same flavor.  The immense tracking shot also seems an allusion to Chinese landscape painting done on long scrolls -- the scroll presents a continuous panorama of mountains and rivers with small villages, Taoist immortals strolling near fairy tale pavilions and wild peaks and forests.  We seem to traverse the painted landscape as we unroll the continuous scroll.   The film engages both sight and sound -- an example is a scene in Kaili in which the protagonist is trying to start a motorbike; he tries to kickstart the bike several times with no success but, then, we hear an engine rev.  But the bike still doesn't move.  The camera slowly tracks to the side where we see that the engine belongs to a bright yellow front-end loader on a flat bed.  The film then documents the bizarre way that the front end loader descends from the flat bed.  When the camera tilts back to where the motorbike was located, the man and cycle are gone -- apparently, while we were engaged in watching the front end loader come down from the flatbed, the motorbike started and has been driven away.  This is an odd sequence, basically a non sequitur, but curiously interesting and beautifully shaped.   Kaili Blues is strange but not pretentious -- it's never dull and the mysteries that it presents are fascinating, although I'm not certain that they have any rational solution.  Yet, unlike many films, the movie's astonishing beauty repays several close watchings even if we aren't sure exactly what we are seeing.