During the past several years, I have used Antonioni's L'Avventura to discount, even disparage, other movies made by that Italian director -- for instance, "sure L'Eclisse is good, but it doesn't hold a candle to L'Avventura." (I tend toward a similar bias when discussing Fellini -- that is, using the epic scope of La Dolce Vita to diminish some of the director's other films.) Therefore, it was salutary that I inherited from a deceased friend a nice Blu-ray version of this film, Antonioni's signature movie and the picture that made him famous outside of Italy. I recall watching the 1960 movie several years ago and being astonished by the film's beauty and profundity. On this watching, I must confess to being more than a little disappointed. L'Avventura remains remarkable, but I now find it's last half a little tedious and aimless.
Everyone will recall the plot. A beautiful young woman, Claudia (Monica Vitti) goes with some wealthy and sybaritic friends on a yacht cruise among the barren and eerie Aeolian Islands -- a smoking volcano guards the horizon in many of these scenes. Claudia's friend, Anna, who is disenchanted with her architect lover and fiancee, Sandro, vanishes. Her friends search the island but there is no trace of her. (At first, we suspect that Anna is punishing Sandro for his callousness by hiding among the volcanic caves and pits on the island -- Sandro takes Anna for granted, no longer satisfies her sexually, and when Anna feigns a shark attack, fails to respond with the necessary gallantry. Later, we suspect that someone may have murdered Anna -- sinister boats have been hanging around the islet and there's a hermit shepherd as well who seems fully capable of raping Anna and disposing of her corpse in the turbulent seas.) The other two couples go to Sicily and give up the search for the missing woman. Claudia continues to search all of the islands and, then, accompanies Sandro along the coast of Sicily where rumors involving sightings of the young woman have been reported. The yacht contained six people (in addition to Raimundo, the ship's captain) with Claudia as a seventh passenger -- it seems that Anna has brought Claudia along to help fend off the advances of Sandro whom she no longer loves. With Anna's disappearance, it is simply logical, a kind of fait accompli, that Claudia will accompany Sandro and, very quickly, even nonchalantly, become his lover. The two persist in the fiction that they are looking for Anna but it's obvious that they are on a journey that is, in fact, a romantic tryst. Claudia feels guilty about sleeping with Sandro but she's self-assured and finds the older man attractive. Ultimately, the couple beds down at a luxury hotel, apparently some sort of castle frequented by the rich and famous -- someone suggests that Anna is among the guests at this expensive and elite hotel. By this time, Claudia is fearful that they will, in fact, encounter the missing woman. Sandro doesn't return to his room and Claudia, discovering that he has not slept in his bed, dashes through the hotel's corridors at dawn -- she is certain that she will find Sandro and Claudia together. Instead, she finds Sandro having sex with a courtesan on a couch in the hotel's solarium. Sandro pays off the prostitute. Claudia and Sandro wander along the fortifications of the castle and, finally, come together on a battlement overlooking an abandoned church, possibly destroyed during the war -- the rising sun rakes across the hollow shadowy vault of the smashed basilica. At first, Claudia can't bring herself to touch Sandro, but, then, with a trembling hand, strokes his lustrous black hair -- it's a creepy maternal gesture and, perhaps, indicates what Sandro has been seeking all along.
The first half of this disheartening story is pretty much beyond reproach. We see Anna with her land-developer father -- he is a monster, simultaneously developing and ruining the eternal city of Rome: looming over the horizon is the basilica of St. Peters, presiding, it seems, over a vast construction site. The old man warns Anna that her architect boyfriend will never marry her -- something that pleases Anna since she doesn't intend to marry the man herself. Anna and Claudia go to a deserted piazza where Sandro lives and Anna takes her boyfriend to bed while Claudia, sometimes seen in deep focus, wanders around the empty landscape: colonnades and shadowy towers like something out of de Chirico. While making love to Sandro, Anna keeps raising her head like someone coming up to gulp air after being underwater -- then, she looks down at her boyfriend with disdain, even disgust. Sandro with the two women in the car shows off exactly as you would expect from an Italian male -- he drives too fast and fishtails the convertible. The scenes at sea and on the island are eerie and feel primordial -- a sea spout grazes disturbed water and the island is riven with deep gorges filled with battering cataracts of wave. A storm traps Sandro and Claudia in the hermit's grotto-like hut. Because it is cold Claudia wears Anna's sweater and Sandro looks at her with a mixture of horror and desire. Claudia uses rainwater impounded in a pitted boulder to wash her face.
The film's theme is intensely gendered -- as far as Italian men are concerned, women are apparently fungible: one can be substituted for another. Sandro simply replaces Anna with Claudia and, when Claudia is too exhausted to satisfy him sexually at the hotel, he takes up with the prostitute. In effect, Claudia becomes the missing girl -- we get the sense that soon enough she will vanish also. Sicily is portrayed as impoverished with near 100% unemployment. Mobs of single men roam the streets harassing the few women that they encounter. In one bizarre scene, about 5000 men gather around a single woman -- she is thought to be Anna. In fact, the woman is just some kind of gold-digger looking to become famous in the tabloids -- but we see an entire army of men mobbing her. The concept seems to be that the southern Italian men will do anything to seduce any available woman, but once they have conquered her, they don't really want anything to do with her. (This is rendered explicit in a short scene in which a housewife from the North speaks in a friendly way to Claudia, identifying her as from Rome -- the woman has been married for only three months, but her husband already seems to be happy ignoring her and flirting in a predatory way with Claudia. After she has exchanged a few words with Claudia, her husband peremptorily orders to to "get back inside." In another scene, Sandro goes into a ramshackle hotel to search for Anna (someone has reported her there) -- in the three minutes that he is absent, a nasty-looking group of about 50 Sicilian thugs gathers around Claudia. She is bizarrely serene and indifferent but the crowd of men are muttering lascivious remarks and the whole thing threatens to turn very ugly. Sandro is quick to threaten other men -- at one point, he gratuitously destroys an ink drawing made by another man, apparently an architecture student. Men are dangerously competitive -- he challenges the student to a fight and one longs to see him gets his faces smashed-in. (No such luck.) If the men are nasty, the women are equally unpleasant -- there's a pointless sequence involving one of the women on the boat initiating a love affair with a gawky 17-year old boy. The kid purports to be an artist but his only subject is naked women. The film gestures toward the theme that Italian men are intrinsically childish, monsters of self-regard, and pretty much uninterested in the woman that they obsessively seduce and bed. But this film signals the beginning of Antonioni's own sexual affair with the much younger Monica Vitti -- she looks to be about twenty, while Antonioni was 47 when he made this movie. So, in some ways, the movie enacts the very sort of relationship that, it seems, to criticize. In effect, the movie tells us that women are invisible -- once seduced, they can be abandoned either emotionally or literally. Clearly, Antonioni was deeply in love with Vitti when they made the movie -- he lets the camera linger on her impassive, pale features and blonde hair at length. And when she wants to mug, he indulges her -- in one scene, she literally makes funny faces at the camera.. The whole thing is grave and mostly very solemn -- in southern Italy (hence the setting in Sicily) men are unique, aggressive, idiosyncratic, by contrast women are totally replaceable, one is as good as another: in the night, all cats are black.
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Country Music (PBS series)
Somewhere on this fruited plain of American exceptionalism, there is, I suppose, a person who has watched all 16 hours of Ken Burns' Country Music without missing an episode and in proper order. I am not that person. It's my estimate that I have seen about half of the show -- that is, eight hours -- and, then, out of order. I reckon that this is enough to achieve a broad sense for how this program works, that is, it's characteristic methods. After his craven PR job for the Mayo Clinic, a film that is basically a corporate advertisement and a meretricious disgrace by any standard,, Burns seems to have withdrawn into his more grave and austere role as national chronicler. He ends the program with the death of Johnny Cash in 2003, but concludes the musical offerings with records released in 1996 -- it seems that Burns wants to leave a dignified gap of time between the present and his historical record, presumably to avoid seeming to endorse any artists currently active. Like a museum curator, Burns realizes, I suppose, that his coverage can raise the value of an artist's stock -- and, so, I think he is cautious not to advance the film beyond music first heard about a quarter of a century before today. One gathers that a generation must pass before one can take objective stock of the hurly-burly of events surrounding us. Despite my reservations about Burns and his films, most viewers will be powerfully affected by the music and images in this documentary and may, even, shed a few tears -- it's the nature of music to awaken powerful passions.
Like most of Burns' films, the director's methodology is all wrong and the mawkish sentiment underpinning the narration often subverts the ostensible sobriety of the presentation. But, as is also the case, the movie is well-paced (within certain limitations), contains great footage, and the "plot" as it were, is effectively, even, suspensefully presented. The subject matter and its personages are so fascinating that the defects in the way that Burns' makes movies don't really matter too much in the end. It's an odd effect: you can dislike Burns' for his morose patriotism and simple-minded view of American history -- you can even detest him, as I do, for his dishonest use of visual imagery (he illustrates his movies with unattributed stock footage that often has nothing to do with what the film is presenting). But the movies are certainly gripping, stir strong emotions, and present a well-nigh encyclopedic depiction of the subject at hand. Country Music is wholly characteristic of Burns' work although more shapeless than his films based upon subjects that have a strong diachronic historical narrative: the Viet Nam war film, after a prelude, starts in the beginning and ends at the end. The history of country music, by contrast, is cyclical -- each generation defines itself as departing from the norms of the genre and, yet, ends up endorsing the traditional characteristics of the musical form. As a result, the film can't really progress in the way that Burns' movie about jazz or, even, baseball can show evolution or development in the style -- Country music is conservative, even, reactionary at heart: for every step forward, it takes two steps back and, as a result, the series is weirdly static and formless: it turns into an encyclopedia of Country Music's major stars with each luminary given four or five minutes screen-time and, some, like the Carter family, Johnny Cash, Emmy Lou Harris, and Willie Nelson accorded through-narratives that are expounded in short vignettes across three or four two-hour episodes. The film has a fractal quality -- anywhere you enter the picture will be more or less like every other part of the movie. Peter Coyote narrates: there's a picture of some downtrodden folks sitting on porch (everything looks grim in black and white but, in fact, the images are indistinguishable from those in the family albums of most White middle-class Americans -- after all, we all come from farms three or four generations back.) We see a little kid proudly holding a toy guitar. Coyote tells us that "X was born in Toodletown, Mississippi to the subtenants of the tenants of sharecroppers so poor that they ate cotton for their meals and lived in an egg carton. From his alcoholic father, employed as an offal-sorter at the rendering plant, X learned the value of hardwork, although inheriting his father's demons. His mother took X to the Great White Throne Baptist Church where the boy sang in the choir..." The narration continues with the hero forming bands, playing at local honky-tonks and, then, going to Nashville where he is kicked around for six or seven years and has to work collecting road kill with a municipal crew. After a stint in jail or a bad divorce or a failed suicide attempt, the hero is discovered, usually while singing soulfully in the Blue Bird Cafe and lands a recording contract. Fame and fortune ensue, but when the studio bosses try to impose too tight a control on the hero's artistic freedom, he decamps for Los Angeles, achieves even greater success, disdains Nashville, and either lives happily ever after or drinks himself to death. The story is always more or less the same. We hear extended snatches of the music made by the protagonist and, then, a witness is summoned to explain the excellence of the lyrics to the hero's songs. History is written by the victors or, in this case, the survivors: the principal talking head witnesses are Marty Stewart, Garth Brooks, Emmy Lou Harris, June Carter Cash and Brenda Lee (among others) -- all of them except the supernaturally beautiful Emmy Lou Harris a little the worse for wear. The film is generally clear-sighted about the nexus between money and art and there is a "mainstreams of modern country western music" approach that defines the progression in the art as passing through Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family or Bill Monroe. In this film, the song "Will the Circle be Unbroken?" provides the haunting "Ashokan farewell" musical motif that plaintively holds the picture together acoustically. The film subscribes to several pernicious lies -- one of them is that the people who make country-western music comprise a "sort of family". This is abundantly untrue from the evidence presented in the movie itself -- Dolly Parton makes the point aggressively but she's always been a fraud in some respects. The show is unified by continued references back to the Ryman Auditorium of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and, despite its scattered, listing or encyclopedic approach to the artists, the musical theme ("Will the Circle be Unbroken?" and the repeated shots of the cathedral-like auditorium serve as counterweights to the film's centrifugal energies. From its outset, Country Music has been a pious fraud or, better put, embodies a "noble lie" about America's rural population -- it's music carefully designed for maximum profit pretends to be ancient or to have ancient roots. A famous country song, featured in the film "The Long Black Veil" exemplifies this aspect of the music: the song sounds like its immemorially old, a relic from 200 or 300 years ago -- but it was written by Marijon Wilkins and David Dill for Lefty Frizzel in 1959. It's no surprise that Country Music is more popular now than ever before at a time when there really is no "country" -- that is, no rural population -- left living on the land.
Like most of Burns' films, the director's methodology is all wrong and the mawkish sentiment underpinning the narration often subverts the ostensible sobriety of the presentation. But, as is also the case, the movie is well-paced (within certain limitations), contains great footage, and the "plot" as it were, is effectively, even, suspensefully presented. The subject matter and its personages are so fascinating that the defects in the way that Burns' makes movies don't really matter too much in the end. It's an odd effect: you can dislike Burns' for his morose patriotism and simple-minded view of American history -- you can even detest him, as I do, for his dishonest use of visual imagery (he illustrates his movies with unattributed stock footage that often has nothing to do with what the film is presenting). But the movies are certainly gripping, stir strong emotions, and present a well-nigh encyclopedic depiction of the subject at hand. Country Music is wholly characteristic of Burns' work although more shapeless than his films based upon subjects that have a strong diachronic historical narrative: the Viet Nam war film, after a prelude, starts in the beginning and ends at the end. The history of country music, by contrast, is cyclical -- each generation defines itself as departing from the norms of the genre and, yet, ends up endorsing the traditional characteristics of the musical form. As a result, the film can't really progress in the way that Burns' movie about jazz or, even, baseball can show evolution or development in the style -- Country music is conservative, even, reactionary at heart: for every step forward, it takes two steps back and, as a result, the series is weirdly static and formless: it turns into an encyclopedia of Country Music's major stars with each luminary given four or five minutes screen-time and, some, like the Carter family, Johnny Cash, Emmy Lou Harris, and Willie Nelson accorded through-narratives that are expounded in short vignettes across three or four two-hour episodes. The film has a fractal quality -- anywhere you enter the picture will be more or less like every other part of the movie. Peter Coyote narrates: there's a picture of some downtrodden folks sitting on porch (everything looks grim in black and white but, in fact, the images are indistinguishable from those in the family albums of most White middle-class Americans -- after all, we all come from farms three or four generations back.) We see a little kid proudly holding a toy guitar. Coyote tells us that "X was born in Toodletown, Mississippi to the subtenants of the tenants of sharecroppers so poor that they ate cotton for their meals and lived in an egg carton. From his alcoholic father, employed as an offal-sorter at the rendering plant, X learned the value of hardwork, although inheriting his father's demons. His mother took X to the Great White Throne Baptist Church where the boy sang in the choir..." The narration continues with the hero forming bands, playing at local honky-tonks and, then, going to Nashville where he is kicked around for six or seven years and has to work collecting road kill with a municipal crew. After a stint in jail or a bad divorce or a failed suicide attempt, the hero is discovered, usually while singing soulfully in the Blue Bird Cafe and lands a recording contract. Fame and fortune ensue, but when the studio bosses try to impose too tight a control on the hero's artistic freedom, he decamps for Los Angeles, achieves even greater success, disdains Nashville, and either lives happily ever after or drinks himself to death. The story is always more or less the same. We hear extended snatches of the music made by the protagonist and, then, a witness is summoned to explain the excellence of the lyrics to the hero's songs. History is written by the victors or, in this case, the survivors: the principal talking head witnesses are Marty Stewart, Garth Brooks, Emmy Lou Harris, June Carter Cash and Brenda Lee (among others) -- all of them except the supernaturally beautiful Emmy Lou Harris a little the worse for wear. The film is generally clear-sighted about the nexus between money and art and there is a "mainstreams of modern country western music" approach that defines the progression in the art as passing through Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family or Bill Monroe. In this film, the song "Will the Circle be Unbroken?" provides the haunting "Ashokan farewell" musical motif that plaintively holds the picture together acoustically. The film subscribes to several pernicious lies -- one of them is that the people who make country-western music comprise a "sort of family". This is abundantly untrue from the evidence presented in the movie itself -- Dolly Parton makes the point aggressively but she's always been a fraud in some respects. The show is unified by continued references back to the Ryman Auditorium of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and, despite its scattered, listing or encyclopedic approach to the artists, the musical theme ("Will the Circle be Unbroken?" and the repeated shots of the cathedral-like auditorium serve as counterweights to the film's centrifugal energies. From its outset, Country Music has been a pious fraud or, better put, embodies a "noble lie" about America's rural population -- it's music carefully designed for maximum profit pretends to be ancient or to have ancient roots. A famous country song, featured in the film "The Long Black Veil" exemplifies this aspect of the music: the song sounds like its immemorially old, a relic from 200 or 300 years ago -- but it was written by Marijon Wilkins and David Dill for Lefty Frizzel in 1959. It's no surprise that Country Music is more popular now than ever before at a time when there really is no "country" -- that is, no rural population -- left living on the land.
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Les Rendezvous d'Anna
Chantal Akerman's Les Renzvous d'Anna (1978) is an austere and astringent film made for Art House release, that is, designed to be seen by a minority of a minority -- feminist-inclined art movie buffs. The picture is self-consciously joyless, a paean to a certain sort of perverse loneliness. It's watchable and, even, compelling in its picturesque hopelessness. But, like many films about profound anomie, it's essentially pointless -- if anything had meaning, then, the film's dogmatic misery would be fraudulent. Akerman is a skillful director and she devises camera placements that complement her narrative -- long tracking shots across train stations, empty street scenes, and many images of people staring out windows onto gloomy-looking cityscapes. There's no music -- the soundtrack buzzes with ambient traffic noise or street sounds; at times, the film has a kind supernal hum that reminds me of the seething, buzzing sounds in David Lynch movies. The picture most resembles some of Wim Wenders' early films -- it is, indeed, a kind of a road movie, although one so severely depressed that the freedom and energy in the genre has been completely repressed.
Anna is a film maker touring art houses with her new movie. She travels alone and spends her nights in cheerless hotel rooms. Anna is beautiful -- she's played by the pale and graceful Aurore Clement -- and she has no trouble picking up men. In fact, despite the film's patina of misery, Anna has two sexual encounters in a period of what seems to me to be three days. In a German city, we see her in bed with a very handsome guy who turns out to be a school teacher -- the actor looks a bit like Rutger Hauer. In the middle of their encounter, she tells him to stop and, disappointed, the school teacher goes home. However, the next day at noon, he picks her up and takes her to his daughter's birthday party. Akerman has the habit of cutting away from anything that might involve interactions between several people -- so we never see Anna discussing her films at theaters and, of course, the party (involving a half-dozen or so participants) is also off-limits. Anna's would- be beaux delivers a long monologue about his mother's house and the War and his divorce: it's self-pitying and not particularly interesting. (This monologue is the first of several in the film, all of them exercises in morose self-pity and none really effective or compelling.) Anna has been trying to call someone in Italy but can't get through -- the "lines are all overloaded", she keeps getting told by the attendants at various long-distance phone salons that she uses. She is going home to Paris via Brussels and Cologne. (Anna is a surrogate for Akerman and we learn that she is Belgian and lived as a girl in Brussels -- she's been in Paris for eight years practicing her profession as film maker: this means that she is 28 at the time of the narrative.) In Cologne, she stops to meet a friend named Ida. Ida is an older woman, possibly Jewish, apparently from Poland. Ida's son was engaged to Anna but, of course, she has dumped him. Ida delivers a monologue about marriage and says "...to be alone is no life, especially for a girl -- it will end badly." Ida talks about her husband and how she once loved him -- now, he's old and grumpy, but she puts up with him on the basis of earlier happy memories. This ringing endorsement of marriage isn't too compelling as far as Anna is concerned. It's the middle of the night. Anna gets back on the train and travels to Brussels -- now it must be about three in the morning. She meets her mother in the empty train station after standing next to a German who delivers another long monologue -- they are both smoking, something allowed in the train's corridors, and gazing out the window at the darkened train stations and empty cities through which they are passing. The German talks about freedom and wanting to meet that special someone --he's probably trying to pick her up, but Anna is so listless and he's so ambiguous in his discourse that the encounter goes nowhere. In Brussels, Anna talks to her mother and they rent a room so they can sleep for a few hours. Anna's mother complains about her husband. Anna gets naked and hops into bed with mom, something that seems strange at least to an American audience, and there they snuggle while Anna talks about a love affair with a beautiful and generous Italian girl -- "better not tell your father," her mother morosely observes. It turns out that the Italian girl is the person Anna has been trying to reach by telephone. Anna, then, gets back on the train and rides to Paris, seemingly arriving late at night. A former lover, Daniel, picks her up and they go to yet another comfortless hotel, even though they both are at home and live alone. Daniel is apparently sick. He indulges himself in a monologue and Anna takes off her clothes to lie naked on top of him. She feels that he is feverish and so she takes a cab for miles and miles through picturesque Paris to buy him some pills. She returns and gives him the medications. Then, she goes home to her anonymous apartment, lays down and listens to the phone messages on her answering machine. The last one is a woman's voice saying "Where are you, Anna?" in English. Presumably, this is the Italian girlfriend. But Anna doesn't call her or really do much of anything since the film is now about to fade to black. Her agent on the answering machine has told her that she will have to tour with her movie in Vienna and Geneva and some other city in the Alps.
The film's characters are all rootless, cosmopolitan, and damaged. The shadow of World War Two hangs over some of the characters who seem battered by their memories of the conflict. At times, Akerman's mise-en-scene seems designed to enact sheer pointlessness -- for instance, she and Ida walk to a railroad cafe, the entire stroll documented by lengthy tracking shots through the mostly empty station; when they reach the cafe, a modernist white patio with empty tables ranged about the room, Anna is no longer hungry. So they turn around and the camera tracks them persistently all the way back to the railroad platform where they met in the first place. (I know why Akerman avoids the cafe -- later, she stages a long scene in a cafe in Brussels with Anna's mother: this is an elaborate old school European cafe with marble-veneer walls and huge mirrors. The feeling that I have is that Akerman, for some reason, didn't want two cafe scenes -- although, she doesn't seem to have any problem with repetitive street and train station scenes.) In some instances, Akerman's staging is frivolous to the point of absurdity: in a confrontation with the school teacher, Anna listens to him monologue in a hotel lobby with the night clerk directly between them as the fulcrum of the carefully balanced and symmetrical shot (she loves symmetry). The discussion is intimate and the viewer is left questioning why the two are unburdening themselves in front an attentive, if impassive, hotel clerk. Aurore Clement is good and looks fantastic naked. But the whole thing is just an excuse for staging lots of Edward Hopper-style Night Hawks images -- empty windows and streets, lonely industrial wastelands, interminable tracking shots of train stations that all look alike. Years ago, I saw Akerman's installation about Russia called, I think, D'Est -- this was at the Walker Art Center around 1991 and featured big screens with twenty and thirty-minute tracking shots along Moscow streets during a snow storm: people were patiently waiting for buses or street cars in the bitter cold. There was no narrative but I thought the installation was fascinating and still think about it sometimes now 30 years later. Anna's encounters, I think, would be better without the connective tissue of its meandering narrative: just give me the precise camera-movements, the lens gliding through endless barren subways and train stations. That would be enough.
Anna is a film maker touring art houses with her new movie. She travels alone and spends her nights in cheerless hotel rooms. Anna is beautiful -- she's played by the pale and graceful Aurore Clement -- and she has no trouble picking up men. In fact, despite the film's patina of misery, Anna has two sexual encounters in a period of what seems to me to be three days. In a German city, we see her in bed with a very handsome guy who turns out to be a school teacher -- the actor looks a bit like Rutger Hauer. In the middle of their encounter, she tells him to stop and, disappointed, the school teacher goes home. However, the next day at noon, he picks her up and takes her to his daughter's birthday party. Akerman has the habit of cutting away from anything that might involve interactions between several people -- so we never see Anna discussing her films at theaters and, of course, the party (involving a half-dozen or so participants) is also off-limits. Anna's would- be beaux delivers a long monologue about his mother's house and the War and his divorce: it's self-pitying and not particularly interesting. (This monologue is the first of several in the film, all of them exercises in morose self-pity and none really effective or compelling.) Anna has been trying to call someone in Italy but can't get through -- the "lines are all overloaded", she keeps getting told by the attendants at various long-distance phone salons that she uses. She is going home to Paris via Brussels and Cologne. (Anna is a surrogate for Akerman and we learn that she is Belgian and lived as a girl in Brussels -- she's been in Paris for eight years practicing her profession as film maker: this means that she is 28 at the time of the narrative.) In Cologne, she stops to meet a friend named Ida. Ida is an older woman, possibly Jewish, apparently from Poland. Ida's son was engaged to Anna but, of course, she has dumped him. Ida delivers a monologue about marriage and says "...to be alone is no life, especially for a girl -- it will end badly." Ida talks about her husband and how she once loved him -- now, he's old and grumpy, but she puts up with him on the basis of earlier happy memories. This ringing endorsement of marriage isn't too compelling as far as Anna is concerned. It's the middle of the night. Anna gets back on the train and travels to Brussels -- now it must be about three in the morning. She meets her mother in the empty train station after standing next to a German who delivers another long monologue -- they are both smoking, something allowed in the train's corridors, and gazing out the window at the darkened train stations and empty cities through which they are passing. The German talks about freedom and wanting to meet that special someone --he's probably trying to pick her up, but Anna is so listless and he's so ambiguous in his discourse that the encounter goes nowhere. In Brussels, Anna talks to her mother and they rent a room so they can sleep for a few hours. Anna's mother complains about her husband. Anna gets naked and hops into bed with mom, something that seems strange at least to an American audience, and there they snuggle while Anna talks about a love affair with a beautiful and generous Italian girl -- "better not tell your father," her mother morosely observes. It turns out that the Italian girl is the person Anna has been trying to reach by telephone. Anna, then, gets back on the train and rides to Paris, seemingly arriving late at night. A former lover, Daniel, picks her up and they go to yet another comfortless hotel, even though they both are at home and live alone. Daniel is apparently sick. He indulges himself in a monologue and Anna takes off her clothes to lie naked on top of him. She feels that he is feverish and so she takes a cab for miles and miles through picturesque Paris to buy him some pills. She returns and gives him the medications. Then, she goes home to her anonymous apartment, lays down and listens to the phone messages on her answering machine. The last one is a woman's voice saying "Where are you, Anna?" in English. Presumably, this is the Italian girlfriend. But Anna doesn't call her or really do much of anything since the film is now about to fade to black. Her agent on the answering machine has told her that she will have to tour with her movie in Vienna and Geneva and some other city in the Alps.
The film's characters are all rootless, cosmopolitan, and damaged. The shadow of World War Two hangs over some of the characters who seem battered by their memories of the conflict. At times, Akerman's mise-en-scene seems designed to enact sheer pointlessness -- for instance, she and Ida walk to a railroad cafe, the entire stroll documented by lengthy tracking shots through the mostly empty station; when they reach the cafe, a modernist white patio with empty tables ranged about the room, Anna is no longer hungry. So they turn around and the camera tracks them persistently all the way back to the railroad platform where they met in the first place. (I know why Akerman avoids the cafe -- later, she stages a long scene in a cafe in Brussels with Anna's mother: this is an elaborate old school European cafe with marble-veneer walls and huge mirrors. The feeling that I have is that Akerman, for some reason, didn't want two cafe scenes -- although, she doesn't seem to have any problem with repetitive street and train station scenes.) In some instances, Akerman's staging is frivolous to the point of absurdity: in a confrontation with the school teacher, Anna listens to him monologue in a hotel lobby with the night clerk directly between them as the fulcrum of the carefully balanced and symmetrical shot (she loves symmetry). The discussion is intimate and the viewer is left questioning why the two are unburdening themselves in front an attentive, if impassive, hotel clerk. Aurore Clement is good and looks fantastic naked. But the whole thing is just an excuse for staging lots of Edward Hopper-style Night Hawks images -- empty windows and streets, lonely industrial wastelands, interminable tracking shots of train stations that all look alike. Years ago, I saw Akerman's installation about Russia called, I think, D'Est -- this was at the Walker Art Center around 1991 and featured big screens with twenty and thirty-minute tracking shots along Moscow streets during a snow storm: people were patiently waiting for buses or street cars in the bitter cold. There was no narrative but I thought the installation was fascinating and still think about it sometimes now 30 years later. Anna's encounters, I think, would be better without the connective tissue of its meandering narrative: just give me the precise camera-movements, the lens gliding through endless barren subways and train stations. That would be enough.
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Ad Astra
Since the glorious finale of Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey, science fiction films involving outer space have been disappointing. By this I mean that the films are thematically disappointing. Even films like First Man stand for the proposition that there's nothing but lethal emptiness in outer space. The space program was an expensive boondoggle -- outer space is just really a very expensive place to die. James Gray's melancholy Ad Astra (2019) is characteristic of this genre, portraying human exploration of the far reaches of the solar system as, more or less, pointless. The picture is beautifully made, although its script is a meretricious mess, and the film gestures toward important themes -- it's worth seeing if only for the superb special effects and the excellent performance by Brad Pitt as an imperturbable astronaut confronted with various unearthly horrors.
Although the film nods toward 2001, featuring a space voyage in search of extra-terrestrial life to the rings of Neptune (viewers will recall 2001's climax among planetary alignments in the orbit of Jupiter), the film's real precursors are Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. An explorer occupying a remote and dangerous post has gone mad -- he methods (if he even has methods) are threatening the colonial imperialist power. And, so, the rulers launch an expedition upriver to terminate the renegade "with extreme prejudice". This is a time-worn plot and always effective until its climax. Captain Kurtz never turns out quite as fearsome and remarkable as he is made out to be. Therefore, the sort of disappointment thematic to outer space movies is intrinsic to this primitive, but gripping, plot -- you can pretty much count on a disappointment when the hero comes face to face with Captain Kurtz and he turns out to be...a very fat Marlon Brando, or here a very elderly Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones (McBride Sr.) is somewhere near Neptune searching for intelligent life. He has apparently gone mad and slaughtered everyone in his space station. When the film begins, he is launching attacks on the earth (apparently) using anti-matter. These attacks create huge power surges that, in turn, seem to cause explosions. (All of this is pretty vague). At the start of the film, McBride Jr. (Brad Pitt) is laboring atop a ten-mile high antennae set up to collect signals from the ETs. A big explosion catapults him off the antennae and he falls about 8,000 feet before pulling the ripcord on a parachute that he is conveniently carrying. This is a fantastically well-filmed scene and pretty terrifying, but it's a cheat -- the hero was never in that much trouble: he has a secret parachute in his gear. (I assume the half-dozen other poor bastards hurtling like meteors out of the exploding antennae's penthouse also had parachutes and landed safely -- but who knows, these falling bodies are just window-dressing. The blast was caused by an anti-matter power surge launched by McBride Sr. and, so, the powers-that-be dispatch the hero to Mars where he is supposed to send a message to his dad. He flies to the moon on a Virgin-Atlantic space-shot that's not nearly as nice as the Pan-Am cruiser that took the hero of 2001 to the moon. The moon turns out to be a war zone where pirates are competing over mining rights. On the way to the place where the space-ship aimed at Mars is located, there's a cowboy-and-Indians battle between moon buggies of pirates that Mad Max-style attack the caravan of good guys heading for the launch base. This is also filmed with tremendous conviction and very exciting but a non sequitur. The terrifying ride to the launch base causes the elderly Donald Sutherland to have a heart attack -- I'm not sure what he's doing in the movie anyway: he doesn't look well and his complexion is like that of poorly resuscitated corpse. McBride Jr. makes the launch for Mars but, once again, trouble ensues. Answering a May Day from a Norwegian medical research satellite, the hero and a couple of astronauts tour the empty space station and, then, are beset by an astonishing and savage adversary. (This plot twist is totally unexpected and so I won't reveal it.) After some gory combat, McBride Jr. gets back to the Mars rocket and makes it to the Red Planet. All is not well on Mars and it appears that McBride Jr. is being used as a pawn by the sinister officials in an effort to destroy his father -- there's lots of ambient paranoia but it makes no sense. What did McBride Jr. think was his mission? Obviously something has to be done to stop Dad from murdering everyone on Earth with surges of anti-matter energy. McBride Jr. now goes renegade himself and with the help of a disconsolate woman who has lived all her life on Mars (she's like one of Zola's mine ponies who never see the light of day), he makes his way to the rocket launching for Neptune. Somehow or another, he stows away in the rocket but when discovered there's a bloody battle and McBride Jr. kills everyone else on board. Now, he's all alone. He flies to Neptune where he disembarks his rocket to travel to Dad's space station. There he encounter Captain Kurtz in the form of his Dad and Tommy Lee Jones gets a chance to use his sad eyes and ravaged face to illustrate a couple of long speeches. Dad kills himself ultimately and the hero, somehow and rather implausibly, makes his way back to Earth. Science Fiction often relies upon a red lever or a red button -- here it's a red button-like lever. This button triggers a mighty explosion of anti-matter which hurls McBride Jr. back to Earth. In the end, the hero is even reconnecting with his estranged wife -- it's supposed to be a happy ending.
But, in fact,the movie is a torrent of Stygian gloom. Tommy Lee Jones has been driven mad by the existential loneliness of outer space. His son notes that he has discovered all sorts of wonderful planets -- places that look tessellated like mosaic floors, planets with volcanoes and rifts and wonderful-looking fissures and cracks in them -- there are planets like Kandinsky canvases and other worlds that look like they were painted by Rothko. McBride Jr. tries to console his Dad that he didn't do all that badly and who cares that he didn't find life in outer space -- but Dad isn't convinced and neither are we: the viewer would gladly exchange all of these gorgeous planets with their simmering, brilliant surfaces for one outer space gnat or ET wood tick.
The film is so imposing and strikes such an intense mood that the viewer doesn't have time to consider the innumerable narrative problems that 'plague the movie? Where is the crew on the Norwegian space ship? Why does the hero have to swim through a vast underground reservoir of murky water to reach the rocket aimed from Mars to Neptune? Why does he have to go to Mars in the first place to send his message to Dad? Why can't he send it from Earth? What's going on with the bursts of anti-matter? Is Tommy Lee Jones shooting them at earth for some odd reason or are they just noisome space farts -- it seems that they may be just space farts. Why doesn't the huge blast of anti-matter that propels the hero back to earth ravage the home planet and destroy everyone there? And, most baffling of all, why is the fabulous Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll) on Mars in a single scene where she seems to be some kind of brassy space secretary and, then, (to my great disappointment) is never shown again? These are all insoluble mysteries.
Although the film nods toward 2001, featuring a space voyage in search of extra-terrestrial life to the rings of Neptune (viewers will recall 2001's climax among planetary alignments in the orbit of Jupiter), the film's real precursors are Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. An explorer occupying a remote and dangerous post has gone mad -- he methods (if he even has methods) are threatening the colonial imperialist power. And, so, the rulers launch an expedition upriver to terminate the renegade "with extreme prejudice". This is a time-worn plot and always effective until its climax. Captain Kurtz never turns out quite as fearsome and remarkable as he is made out to be. Therefore, the sort of disappointment thematic to outer space movies is intrinsic to this primitive, but gripping, plot -- you can pretty much count on a disappointment when the hero comes face to face with Captain Kurtz and he turns out to be...a very fat Marlon Brando, or here a very elderly Tommy Lee Jones. Tommy Lee Jones (McBride Sr.) is somewhere near Neptune searching for intelligent life. He has apparently gone mad and slaughtered everyone in his space station. When the film begins, he is launching attacks on the earth (apparently) using anti-matter. These attacks create huge power surges that, in turn, seem to cause explosions. (All of this is pretty vague). At the start of the film, McBride Jr. (Brad Pitt) is laboring atop a ten-mile high antennae set up to collect signals from the ETs. A big explosion catapults him off the antennae and he falls about 8,000 feet before pulling the ripcord on a parachute that he is conveniently carrying. This is a fantastically well-filmed scene and pretty terrifying, but it's a cheat -- the hero was never in that much trouble: he has a secret parachute in his gear. (I assume the half-dozen other poor bastards hurtling like meteors out of the exploding antennae's penthouse also had parachutes and landed safely -- but who knows, these falling bodies are just window-dressing. The blast was caused by an anti-matter power surge launched by McBride Sr. and, so, the powers-that-be dispatch the hero to Mars where he is supposed to send a message to his dad. He flies to the moon on a Virgin-Atlantic space-shot that's not nearly as nice as the Pan-Am cruiser that took the hero of 2001 to the moon. The moon turns out to be a war zone where pirates are competing over mining rights. On the way to the place where the space-ship aimed at Mars is located, there's a cowboy-and-Indians battle between moon buggies of pirates that Mad Max-style attack the caravan of good guys heading for the launch base. This is also filmed with tremendous conviction and very exciting but a non sequitur. The terrifying ride to the launch base causes the elderly Donald Sutherland to have a heart attack -- I'm not sure what he's doing in the movie anyway: he doesn't look well and his complexion is like that of poorly resuscitated corpse. McBride Jr. makes the launch for Mars but, once again, trouble ensues. Answering a May Day from a Norwegian medical research satellite, the hero and a couple of astronauts tour the empty space station and, then, are beset by an astonishing and savage adversary. (This plot twist is totally unexpected and so I won't reveal it.) After some gory combat, McBride Jr. gets back to the Mars rocket and makes it to the Red Planet. All is not well on Mars and it appears that McBride Jr. is being used as a pawn by the sinister officials in an effort to destroy his father -- there's lots of ambient paranoia but it makes no sense. What did McBride Jr. think was his mission? Obviously something has to be done to stop Dad from murdering everyone on Earth with surges of anti-matter energy. McBride Jr. now goes renegade himself and with the help of a disconsolate woman who has lived all her life on Mars (she's like one of Zola's mine ponies who never see the light of day), he makes his way to the rocket launching for Neptune. Somehow or another, he stows away in the rocket but when discovered there's a bloody battle and McBride Jr. kills everyone else on board. Now, he's all alone. He flies to Neptune where he disembarks his rocket to travel to Dad's space station. There he encounter Captain Kurtz in the form of his Dad and Tommy Lee Jones gets a chance to use his sad eyes and ravaged face to illustrate a couple of long speeches. Dad kills himself ultimately and the hero, somehow and rather implausibly, makes his way back to Earth. Science Fiction often relies upon a red lever or a red button -- here it's a red button-like lever. This button triggers a mighty explosion of anti-matter which hurls McBride Jr. back to Earth. In the end, the hero is even reconnecting with his estranged wife -- it's supposed to be a happy ending.
But, in fact,the movie is a torrent of Stygian gloom. Tommy Lee Jones has been driven mad by the existential loneliness of outer space. His son notes that he has discovered all sorts of wonderful planets -- places that look tessellated like mosaic floors, planets with volcanoes and rifts and wonderful-looking fissures and cracks in them -- there are planets like Kandinsky canvases and other worlds that look like they were painted by Rothko. McBride Jr. tries to console his Dad that he didn't do all that badly and who cares that he didn't find life in outer space -- but Dad isn't convinced and neither are we: the viewer would gladly exchange all of these gorgeous planets with their simmering, brilliant surfaces for one outer space gnat or ET wood tick.
The film is so imposing and strikes such an intense mood that the viewer doesn't have time to consider the innumerable narrative problems that 'plague the movie? Where is the crew on the Norwegian space ship? Why does the hero have to swim through a vast underground reservoir of murky water to reach the rocket aimed from Mars to Neptune? Why does he have to go to Mars in the first place to send his message to Dad? Why can't he send it from Earth? What's going on with the bursts of anti-matter? Is Tommy Lee Jones shooting them at earth for some odd reason or are they just noisome space farts -- it seems that they may be just space farts. Why doesn't the huge blast of anti-matter that propels the hero back to earth ravage the home planet and destroy everyone there? And, most baffling of all, why is the fabulous Natasha Lyonne (Russian Doll) on Mars in a single scene where she seems to be some kind of brassy space secretary and, then, (to my great disappointment) is never shown again? These are all insoluble mysteries.
Friday, September 20, 2019
The Gold Rush
The Gold Rush (1925) is Charlie Chaplin's most famous film. Until recently, it was hard to see in anything like it's original form: Chaplin re-released the picture which he directed and owned in 1942 as a sound version with full orchestral score, no intertitles, and narration that he provided. He seems to have re-edited the film slightly and, in any event, the picture's rhythm would have been decisively altered by excising the titles. In the last ten years, Ritrovota Bologna together with Criterion have restored the film, primarily by using a 35 mm copy of the 1925 original found in someone's private collection. The Criterion/Ritrovata version is startlingly clear throughout much of its length and, in fact, some of interior shots probably look better today than they did in 1925. Chaplin stages much of the film as if it were a Victorian entertainment on proscenium stage -- the sets for the cabin interiors where most of the action occurs look like opera sets for the David Belasco version of Puccini's Girl of the Golden West or any number of other theatrical presentations and melodramas around the turn of the century. Chaplin uses very few close-ups -- in fact, he has no tight close-ups in the whole film. He moves the camera once, during a dance scene in a saloon. He is fairly clever about staging action in depth, utilizing the deep focus of the cameras existing at that time -- this is particularly evident in scenes in the saloon: it's a big set with a upstairs balcony and Chaplin can stage something happening in the foreground and, then, reveal that the event was witnessed by those high above on the balcony. He uses intentionally dated effects to achieve a nostalgic atmosphere -- the film is set in the dawn of the age of movies, that is, the Klondike gold rush around 1900. To enhance nostalgia, he irises in on one shot to isolate his heroine, the saloon girl Georgia upstairs on the balcony overlooking the dance-floor. Chaplin's special effects are very poor. Most of so-called outdoors scenes take place on a stage with painted horizons and piles of white, sleek snow (most likely flour mixed with salt) The big climax in which a log cabin gets blown to a precipice where it perches, balanced like a teeter-totter is so poorly staged and so obviously fake that it spoils the whole movie. When Harold Lloyd dangles from a clock-face, he seems to be working at a dangerous height above the city streets and the comedy has a sizzling frisson of danger -- the viewer actually fears that the comedian will fall to his death. Chaplin takes no such care in staging his sequences involving apparent danger -- the sets are fake and the little dolls dangling, for instance, from the cabin at the climax are laughably unrealistic. There is an odd clash between some scenes that I know were shot in the Sierra Nevada above Lake Tahoe -- real scree slopes with slippery snowfields and nasty-looking basalt cliffs (the little tramp marches with weird aplomb through this dangerous-looking landscape) -- and the cheap-looking theatrical sets and the outdoors scenes that are obviously shot on a stage under hot lights. This clash in styles is further aggravated by the elaborately documentary-style opening -- the film contains iconic images of miners trudging up and over Chilkoot pass, long ant-like files of men staggering uphill in the snow. Although these scenes were staged for the movie (at Truckee, California with 2400 extras)-- the most impressive Chilkoot Pass scenes have obvious matte-painted mountains in them -- they, nonetheless, look icy and cold enough and establish a base-line for realism at the outset of the movie. Within five minutes, however, the movie has progressed (or should I say devolved) to Chaplin's gags, generally shot from mid-distance using proscenium arch staging. As I have earlier suggested, I think Chaplin works in an intentionally archaic style consistent with the overblown pathos and melodrama that much of his plot requires and, further, redolent of the era of the great Gold Rush. But the fact that an effect is intended doesn't mean that it necessarily works -- and much of the movie is so obviously fake that it detracts (and distracts) from the film's more effective moments. (A good example involves a bear. We see Chaplin as the Little Tramp plodding along side a terrifying, but obviously, fake precipice. It's a painted precipice with painted icicles on the declivity's craggy cliffs. As the Tramp passes a cleft in the cliff-side a big bear ambles out and follows him -- the joke is that he doesn't notice the bear just a few yards behind him. This works pretty well because the animal is obviously a real bruin. In a later scene, the same bear enters a cabin and fights with a man -- the bear is real up to the point of the duel with the cabin-dweller. As soon as the fight begins, the bear is replaced by a man in a grizzly suit -- it's a jarring cut, because the man in the bear-suit looks completely fake.) I don't mind stylization if it serves the plot and characters and seems to be intended by the director -- but many of the stylized effects in The Gold Rush appear to me to be the result of ineptitude or laziness or a low budget.
The film's plot is also contrived, basically a string of "bits" or gags, tacked together without much rhyme or reason. Characters are always inexplicably appearing and, then, vanishing. Chaplin doesn't want any one to interfere with the pathos of the Little Tramp and, so, secondary roles are underwritten and, when a character is no longer needed for the progression of gags, the character just vanishes from the screen without much explanation. For instance, the second half of the film involves a lot of action at a cabin near the dance hall. The Little Tramp is too poor to afford a cabin and so the actual occupants of the place, after a few gags, get on their dog sled and simply depart from the film -- this is so the Little Tramp can make the place his own for the scenes required in that area. A main character Big Jim McKay, a huge man who is comically twice Chaplin's height and volume, gets his brains scrambled by a blow on the head and spends three-fifths of the movie just tramping around in the snow -- we see him at one point staggering, crazed-looking, straight for the camera. But when McKay is needed for the plot, he conveniently turns up. Here's the story in a nutshell: the Little Tramp inexplicably seeks his fortune in the Gold Rush. He shares a cabin with Big Jim. They run out of food and Big Jim turns cannibal -- this is after the famous, and rather revolting scene, in which the Tramp cooks and eats his boot. (After he has eaten his right boot, he spends the rest movie limping around with his right foot encased in thick filthy rags.) A claim jumper kills a couple of Mounties and, then, beats up Big Jim who has discovered a mountain of gold. Big Jim wanders through ice and snow in a semi-comatose, bewildered state. (The bad guy is killed when a cliff of snow where he is standing calves off the glacier and plunges into an abyss -- there's enough mayhem in the film to qualify it as a Romance, that is, a comedy in which deaths occur; indeed, there's a Shakespearian edge to this Romance embodied by the bear who makes various appearances when needed: it's a bit like The Winter's Tale in which an unneeded character is disposed-of by being eaten by a bear.) The Tramp turns up in a village. He falls in love with s saloon girl who completely ignores him. He invites her to a New Year's Eve dinner at his cabin -- but, of course, she works in a Dance Hall and New Year's Eve is a big pay-day for her. The girl and her friends don't turn up. The Tramp falls asleep and there follows the one genuinely weird and startling sequence in the film: the Tramp skewers two potatoes one with each fork and has the potatoes dance like big feet on the edge of the table: all the time the potatoes are performing the Tramp makes strangely simpering expressions, pursing his lips into a bee-sting, as if impersonating a crazed Mary Pickford. This scene is indelibly strange, not really funny but grotesque, and its certainly memorable. The girls don't ever show up and the Tramp goes to the dance hall where he sees his beloved in the arms of a caddish baby-faced miner. He and the miner clash and threats are exchanged. Then, Big Jim reappears having forgotten the location of Mountain of Gold. The two men find the cabin in the wilderness and, during a frightful blizzard, the building is blown onto the precipice over the canyon where the climactic teeter-totter house scene takes place. Big Jim finds his gold and two men become millionaires. On the ship back home, Georgia is in steerage. She meets the Tramp who still looks impoverished although he is now fantastically wealthy. She offers to pay for his passage -- he is accused of being a stowaway and, thus, we see that she is now, finally, worthy of the hero's love. He reveals that he's a millionaire, kisses her and the movie ends. I've left out a few clever gags, including a dance with Georgia in the saloon in which the Tramp has somehow got himself entangled with a dog who prances along side him as he tries to woo his lady-love. In general, the film is dated and not very funny at all. In fact, I think it will be very tedious to most modern audiences and, in fact, my guess is that it was tedious when first released as well.
Admirers of silent comedy tend to divide into those who are fans of Laurel and Hardy (this is where I place my allegiance), fans of Buster Keaton, and those who praise Chaplin to the highest heavens (often I think as a misguided homage to his left-leaning politics). Laurel and Hardy's comedy is still funny and grimly anarchic -- it's very cruel but rooted in the bizarre relationship between the two men, probably the most penetrating portrait of a marriage ever filmed. Despite the surrealism in Laurel and Hardy's movies, they are generally staged in lower middle class environs that have instant credibility with the audience and the emotional charge invested in the relationship between the two men gives their picture an additional patina of realism. Buster Keaton's films involve elaborate family relationships -- in Steamboat Bill, he's the bullied son a vicious steam boat captain; in other films, he has entire families with which to content. Keaton is also surreal but with a hard documentary edge -- his film about the Civil War, The General, is often compared with the war photographs of Matthew Brady. The Little Tramp has always seemed to me to be more than a little mawkish and self-indulgent -- this is particularly true with some of the gags (for instance, the minuet of the potato's skewered on forks.) Chaplin's very athletic -- you can see that in the scenes simulating a tempest that blows him off his feet -- but his art feels overtly nostalgic, and much too sentimental. Chaplin seems to be trafficking in emotions that he is too sophisticated to feel but which he has no trouble projecting for rubes in his audience. (Nonetheless, there's one very effective scene of pathos in The Gold Rush: in the saloon at midnight, someone sings "Auld lang syne" -- and we see the whores and grizzled old prospectors suddenly silent, abashed even, thinking back upon their remote, lost families. It's very moving, and purely generous in the context of the film -- the scene is unnecessary and doesn't advance the chaotic story but it feels very real unlike most of the rest of the movie.)
The film's plot is also contrived, basically a string of "bits" or gags, tacked together without much rhyme or reason. Characters are always inexplicably appearing and, then, vanishing. Chaplin doesn't want any one to interfere with the pathos of the Little Tramp and, so, secondary roles are underwritten and, when a character is no longer needed for the progression of gags, the character just vanishes from the screen without much explanation. For instance, the second half of the film involves a lot of action at a cabin near the dance hall. The Little Tramp is too poor to afford a cabin and so the actual occupants of the place, after a few gags, get on their dog sled and simply depart from the film -- this is so the Little Tramp can make the place his own for the scenes required in that area. A main character Big Jim McKay, a huge man who is comically twice Chaplin's height and volume, gets his brains scrambled by a blow on the head and spends three-fifths of the movie just tramping around in the snow -- we see him at one point staggering, crazed-looking, straight for the camera. But when McKay is needed for the plot, he conveniently turns up. Here's the story in a nutshell: the Little Tramp inexplicably seeks his fortune in the Gold Rush. He shares a cabin with Big Jim. They run out of food and Big Jim turns cannibal -- this is after the famous, and rather revolting scene, in which the Tramp cooks and eats his boot. (After he has eaten his right boot, he spends the rest movie limping around with his right foot encased in thick filthy rags.) A claim jumper kills a couple of Mounties and, then, beats up Big Jim who has discovered a mountain of gold. Big Jim wanders through ice and snow in a semi-comatose, bewildered state. (The bad guy is killed when a cliff of snow where he is standing calves off the glacier and plunges into an abyss -- there's enough mayhem in the film to qualify it as a Romance, that is, a comedy in which deaths occur; indeed, there's a Shakespearian edge to this Romance embodied by the bear who makes various appearances when needed: it's a bit like The Winter's Tale in which an unneeded character is disposed-of by being eaten by a bear.) The Tramp turns up in a village. He falls in love with s saloon girl who completely ignores him. He invites her to a New Year's Eve dinner at his cabin -- but, of course, she works in a Dance Hall and New Year's Eve is a big pay-day for her. The girl and her friends don't turn up. The Tramp falls asleep and there follows the one genuinely weird and startling sequence in the film: the Tramp skewers two potatoes one with each fork and has the potatoes dance like big feet on the edge of the table: all the time the potatoes are performing the Tramp makes strangely simpering expressions, pursing his lips into a bee-sting, as if impersonating a crazed Mary Pickford. This scene is indelibly strange, not really funny but grotesque, and its certainly memorable. The girls don't ever show up and the Tramp goes to the dance hall where he sees his beloved in the arms of a caddish baby-faced miner. He and the miner clash and threats are exchanged. Then, Big Jim reappears having forgotten the location of Mountain of Gold. The two men find the cabin in the wilderness and, during a frightful blizzard, the building is blown onto the precipice over the canyon where the climactic teeter-totter house scene takes place. Big Jim finds his gold and two men become millionaires. On the ship back home, Georgia is in steerage. She meets the Tramp who still looks impoverished although he is now fantastically wealthy. She offers to pay for his passage -- he is accused of being a stowaway and, thus, we see that she is now, finally, worthy of the hero's love. He reveals that he's a millionaire, kisses her and the movie ends. I've left out a few clever gags, including a dance with Georgia in the saloon in which the Tramp has somehow got himself entangled with a dog who prances along side him as he tries to woo his lady-love. In general, the film is dated and not very funny at all. In fact, I think it will be very tedious to most modern audiences and, in fact, my guess is that it was tedious when first released as well.
Admirers of silent comedy tend to divide into those who are fans of Laurel and Hardy (this is where I place my allegiance), fans of Buster Keaton, and those who praise Chaplin to the highest heavens (often I think as a misguided homage to his left-leaning politics). Laurel and Hardy's comedy is still funny and grimly anarchic -- it's very cruel but rooted in the bizarre relationship between the two men, probably the most penetrating portrait of a marriage ever filmed. Despite the surrealism in Laurel and Hardy's movies, they are generally staged in lower middle class environs that have instant credibility with the audience and the emotional charge invested in the relationship between the two men gives their picture an additional patina of realism. Buster Keaton's films involve elaborate family relationships -- in Steamboat Bill, he's the bullied son a vicious steam boat captain; in other films, he has entire families with which to content. Keaton is also surreal but with a hard documentary edge -- his film about the Civil War, The General, is often compared with the war photographs of Matthew Brady. The Little Tramp has always seemed to me to be more than a little mawkish and self-indulgent -- this is particularly true with some of the gags (for instance, the minuet of the potato's skewered on forks.) Chaplin's very athletic -- you can see that in the scenes simulating a tempest that blows him off his feet -- but his art feels overtly nostalgic, and much too sentimental. Chaplin seems to be trafficking in emotions that he is too sophisticated to feel but which he has no trouble projecting for rubes in his audience. (Nonetheless, there's one very effective scene of pathos in The Gold Rush: in the saloon at midnight, someone sings "Auld lang syne" -- and we see the whores and grizzled old prospectors suddenly silent, abashed even, thinking back upon their remote, lost families. It's very moving, and purely generous in the context of the film -- the scene is unnecessary and doesn't advance the chaotic story but it feels very real unlike most of the rest of the movie.)
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Rashomon
With respect to women, men come in two types: abusers and rescuers. A perennial problem is that these categories are fluid -- a man may be both abuser and rescuer, sometimes with respect to the same woman. Akira Kurosawa's famous 1950 film, Rashomon explores this fraught aspect of male-female relations in a stark, even apocalyptic context. The film is far bigger than its content, primarily due to Kurosawa's aggressively detailed and, even, lyrical pictorial style. Of course, the movie's fractured narrative, an account of a squalid rape and murder told from four different perspectives represents a landmark in the history of cinema. The overtly unreliable narrators who inhabit this tale are pressed into the film's foreground in a way that seemed unprecedented in 1950 and, that, has been enormously influential in the intervening 69 years -- as President Trump's apologist, Kelly Anne Conway would say: "there are facts and, then, there are alternative facts." Earlier films gestured in the direction of the radical uncertainty that Rashomon highlights: Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (1926), at least in the fragmentary form that I have seen, adopts the perspective of a highly unreliable point-of-view -- accordingly, this sort of effect was not unknown in Japanese cinema. Similarly, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) exploits effects arising from the point-of-view of a madman. Preston Sturges posits different operatic scenarios for the slaughter of an unfaithful wife in his Unfaithfully Yours (1948) and, of course, Orson Welles explored the notion of a biography constructed from a prismatic perspective comprising a half-dozen or so witnesses to the great man's life and times. But there is no doubt that Rashomon, whatever its precedents, feels like something new under the sun.
A woodcutter and another man, apparently a Buddhist priest, have taken shelter from torrential rains in a ruined palace or fortress. The place seems to have been burned and we are told that "unclaimed bodies" still freight the charred, skeletal structure above the gate. Clearly, this spectacular set, streaming water in the downpour, stands for post-War Japan -- the battle is over, the cities are in ruins, and the survivors now huddle together in the icy rain trying to figure what exactly happened to them and their civilization. Kurosawa exploits the apocalyptic wreckage of Japanese culture to raise fundamental questions about whether human beings are capable of telling the truth and, if they can not be trusted except to lie to one another, then, how is any sort of civilization possible. (Kurosawa ultimately evades the questions that his narrative raises on this level, providing a non sequitur or deus ex machina ending that is emotionally satisfying but more than a little limp.) A third man, some kind of peasant, joins the colloquy in the ruins -- this character seems demonic, a kind of accuser, who laughs at human pretensions toward virtue and civilization. The plot has an eerie Noh theater ambience -- the cynical third man may be some kind of ghost or devil, although Kurosawa doesn't really twist the film in the direction of the supernatural.
The woodcutter has come from a hearing in a literal court -- that is, the fore-court of a palace or military compound where the witnesses sit under a broiling sun at an inquest into the death of a nobleman found in the nearby forest. The thunderstorm is approaching -- sometimes, the witnesses look up to see big clouds, thunderheads, towering over the land. The woodcutter, as first witness, explains that he discovered the body of a nobleman, arms upraised in a kind of aghast rigor mortis in the woods. A bandit, bound hand and foot, then, says that he was sleeping in the forest when the nobleman passed him, leading a woman of great beauty on a horse or mule -- the woman was veiled, a vision of bright light radiant on her pale silk kimono, and, when the wind stirred in the woods, the parasol under which she was riding was disturbed and, for a moment, her white face was visible to the bandit. The bandit claims that he was the victim of circumstance -- that if he had not been accidently vouchsafed this vision of the woman's beauty, the killing would not have occurred. (Throughout the film, accidents of light trigger action -- a sunbeam picks out a dagger in the shadows of a forest and this triggers a killing.) As it happened,the bandit inflamed by lust, lured the nobleman into a sun-bathed but shadow-dappled clearing, bound him with a rope, and, then, after threatening to rape the woman, instead seduces her. In his account, the bandit unties the nobleman, duels with him, and kills his opponent. The woman, then, testifies -- she claims the bandit raped her and that, because of this her husband looked upon him with loathing in his eyes. She, then, kills the husband, ostensibly in a fit of temporary insanity, and fails at her attempt at suicide. A medium is, then, summoned to channel the spirit of the dead nobleman. Humiliated by his wife's embrace of the bandit whom she has enthusiastically accepted, he stabs himself to death. In the shelter of the smashed palace, the woodcutter, then, admits that he lied to the tribunal -- he actually saw the encounter between the bandit, the nobleman and his wife. The woman feigned indignation at the rape and, when released by the bandit, she peremptorily demands that the men fight over her -- there follows a farcical duel in which both combatants are so terrified that they spend most of the fight scrambling away from one another. In the end, the bandit, more or less, accidentally kills the nobleman. Left unsolved is the mystery of the disappearance of the nobleman's gilded dagger -- however, it seems clear that the woodcutter has stolen the weapon.
Kurosawa's style is elaborately maximalist. He uses ten shots to illumine what most directors would show in two or three images. As an example, when the woodcutter narrates his first account, we see him ambling through the forest, an impressive place with massive trunks and dark shadows, streams rippling under small bridges and, finally a sort of clearing or amphitheater where most of the action takes place -- Kurosawa shows his character from the side, from above, he tracks the man's motions, and, when he crosses the bridge, shoots from underneath the figure. He cuts from shots showing the man moving through the woods in a sort of cubist montage of different angles and perspectives to images taken from the woodcutter's point-of-view -- moving shots of the woods ahead of him or the overhead canopy of leaves shot-through with sun-flares. This sort of intensely pictorial style is used throughout the film -- every sequence is elaborated into a complex decoupage of different points of view and different techniques for staging action: sometimes, Kurosawa uses huge close-ups in quick montage, then, long shots with the figures widely separated on the screen -- unlike many of the director's later films the movie is not shot in wide-screen but uses Academy ratio. In some sequences, Kurosawa stages the action balletically, figures moving in long choreographed takes across the amphitheater-like clearing where most of the film takes place. The scenes showing the court are highly stylized. We never hear questions put to the witnesses, not do we see the officials presiding at the inquest. The characters kneel in the sunbaked arena of the courtyard and address the camera -- we, the audience, are the ultimate arbiters of what is shown in the film: our judgement ultimately is paramount. The only exception to this rule are the scenes involving the medium -- the soothsayer seems to be of some intermediate gender, speaks in a weird hollow voice, and his or her swooning testimony is given under the aegis of a sort of parasol with a rattle that clatters above the contorted figure.
The film skillfully alternates between the war-ravaged ruins battered by rain, the sun-dappled glade where vagrant beams of light pick out face or the glitter of a weapon, and the stark theatrical court, a set that looks like something out of a Beckett play. As the movie progresses, the woodcutter and priest begin to doubt the meaning of human life -- the fact that the sordid little encounter can't be better understood and that everyone, inevitably, lies casts them into profound, nihilistic doubt about the human community. In fact, the two men ultimately agree that "if men don't trust one another, this world might as well be hell." It's risky to criticize a work of art that operates on this level, but, frankly put, this assertion seems more than a little bit hysterical and overblown. Why does it come as a surprise to Kurosawa that human beings are unreliable narrators, that they have difficulty telling the truth and tend to be self-aggrandizing? This seems an obvious proposition and it's puzzling that Kurosawa's protagonists, who have seemingly witnessed a time of warfare, the most profound exercise of human evil, would be surprised by the fact that sometimes people lie. The solution to the conundrum is not a solution -- someone has left a baby in the ruins of the temple or palace (or whatever it is) and the woodcutter resolves to raise the child as a member of his family; he already has six children. The rain stops and the sun comes out and the woodcutter's act of ordinary kindness seems to signal that the world is not really hell after all. Everyone should see this movie and, even, debate it -- but, in comparison, with the much richer (and longer) Ikiru or The Seven Samurai, I think its a brilliant, but shallow, work.
A woodcutter and another man, apparently a Buddhist priest, have taken shelter from torrential rains in a ruined palace or fortress. The place seems to have been burned and we are told that "unclaimed bodies" still freight the charred, skeletal structure above the gate. Clearly, this spectacular set, streaming water in the downpour, stands for post-War Japan -- the battle is over, the cities are in ruins, and the survivors now huddle together in the icy rain trying to figure what exactly happened to them and their civilization. Kurosawa exploits the apocalyptic wreckage of Japanese culture to raise fundamental questions about whether human beings are capable of telling the truth and, if they can not be trusted except to lie to one another, then, how is any sort of civilization possible. (Kurosawa ultimately evades the questions that his narrative raises on this level, providing a non sequitur or deus ex machina ending that is emotionally satisfying but more than a little limp.) A third man, some kind of peasant, joins the colloquy in the ruins -- this character seems demonic, a kind of accuser, who laughs at human pretensions toward virtue and civilization. The plot has an eerie Noh theater ambience -- the cynical third man may be some kind of ghost or devil, although Kurosawa doesn't really twist the film in the direction of the supernatural.
The woodcutter has come from a hearing in a literal court -- that is, the fore-court of a palace or military compound where the witnesses sit under a broiling sun at an inquest into the death of a nobleman found in the nearby forest. The thunderstorm is approaching -- sometimes, the witnesses look up to see big clouds, thunderheads, towering over the land. The woodcutter, as first witness, explains that he discovered the body of a nobleman, arms upraised in a kind of aghast rigor mortis in the woods. A bandit, bound hand and foot, then, says that he was sleeping in the forest when the nobleman passed him, leading a woman of great beauty on a horse or mule -- the woman was veiled, a vision of bright light radiant on her pale silk kimono, and, when the wind stirred in the woods, the parasol under which she was riding was disturbed and, for a moment, her white face was visible to the bandit. The bandit claims that he was the victim of circumstance -- that if he had not been accidently vouchsafed this vision of the woman's beauty, the killing would not have occurred. (Throughout the film, accidents of light trigger action -- a sunbeam picks out a dagger in the shadows of a forest and this triggers a killing.) As it happened,the bandit inflamed by lust, lured the nobleman into a sun-bathed but shadow-dappled clearing, bound him with a rope, and, then, after threatening to rape the woman, instead seduces her. In his account, the bandit unties the nobleman, duels with him, and kills his opponent. The woman, then, testifies -- she claims the bandit raped her and that, because of this her husband looked upon him with loathing in his eyes. She, then, kills the husband, ostensibly in a fit of temporary insanity, and fails at her attempt at suicide. A medium is, then, summoned to channel the spirit of the dead nobleman. Humiliated by his wife's embrace of the bandit whom she has enthusiastically accepted, he stabs himself to death. In the shelter of the smashed palace, the woodcutter, then, admits that he lied to the tribunal -- he actually saw the encounter between the bandit, the nobleman and his wife. The woman feigned indignation at the rape and, when released by the bandit, she peremptorily demands that the men fight over her -- there follows a farcical duel in which both combatants are so terrified that they spend most of the fight scrambling away from one another. In the end, the bandit, more or less, accidentally kills the nobleman. Left unsolved is the mystery of the disappearance of the nobleman's gilded dagger -- however, it seems clear that the woodcutter has stolen the weapon.
Kurosawa's style is elaborately maximalist. He uses ten shots to illumine what most directors would show in two or three images. As an example, when the woodcutter narrates his first account, we see him ambling through the forest, an impressive place with massive trunks and dark shadows, streams rippling under small bridges and, finally a sort of clearing or amphitheater where most of the action takes place -- Kurosawa shows his character from the side, from above, he tracks the man's motions, and, when he crosses the bridge, shoots from underneath the figure. He cuts from shots showing the man moving through the woods in a sort of cubist montage of different angles and perspectives to images taken from the woodcutter's point-of-view -- moving shots of the woods ahead of him or the overhead canopy of leaves shot-through with sun-flares. This sort of intensely pictorial style is used throughout the film -- every sequence is elaborated into a complex decoupage of different points of view and different techniques for staging action: sometimes, Kurosawa uses huge close-ups in quick montage, then, long shots with the figures widely separated on the screen -- unlike many of the director's later films the movie is not shot in wide-screen but uses Academy ratio. In some sequences, Kurosawa stages the action balletically, figures moving in long choreographed takes across the amphitheater-like clearing where most of the film takes place. The scenes showing the court are highly stylized. We never hear questions put to the witnesses, not do we see the officials presiding at the inquest. The characters kneel in the sunbaked arena of the courtyard and address the camera -- we, the audience, are the ultimate arbiters of what is shown in the film: our judgement ultimately is paramount. The only exception to this rule are the scenes involving the medium -- the soothsayer seems to be of some intermediate gender, speaks in a weird hollow voice, and his or her swooning testimony is given under the aegis of a sort of parasol with a rattle that clatters above the contorted figure.
The film skillfully alternates between the war-ravaged ruins battered by rain, the sun-dappled glade where vagrant beams of light pick out face or the glitter of a weapon, and the stark theatrical court, a set that looks like something out of a Beckett play. As the movie progresses, the woodcutter and priest begin to doubt the meaning of human life -- the fact that the sordid little encounter can't be better understood and that everyone, inevitably, lies casts them into profound, nihilistic doubt about the human community. In fact, the two men ultimately agree that "if men don't trust one another, this world might as well be hell." It's risky to criticize a work of art that operates on this level, but, frankly put, this assertion seems more than a little bit hysterical and overblown. Why does it come as a surprise to Kurosawa that human beings are unreliable narrators, that they have difficulty telling the truth and tend to be self-aggrandizing? This seems an obvious proposition and it's puzzling that Kurosawa's protagonists, who have seemingly witnessed a time of warfare, the most profound exercise of human evil, would be surprised by the fact that sometimes people lie. The solution to the conundrum is not a solution -- someone has left a baby in the ruins of the temple or palace (or whatever it is) and the woodcutter resolves to raise the child as a member of his family; he already has six children. The rain stops and the sun comes out and the woodcutter's act of ordinary kindness seems to signal that the world is not really hell after all. Everyone should see this movie and, even, debate it -- but, in comparison, with the much richer (and longer) Ikiru or The Seven Samurai, I think its a brilliant, but shallow, work.
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Aquarela
Russian filmmaker Victor Kossokovsky's Aquarela (2019) is what was once called a "head movie" -- that is, the film is form of psychedelia designed to induce rapturous contemplation. These sorts of movies are, in effect, light shows constructed of mind-altering imagery that is probably best viewed under the influence of mind-altering drugs. Older folks will recall Walt Disney's Fantasia, an animated feature made for classical music devotees that had a vigorous second-life as a psychedelic "head" movie. Pink Floyd's The Wall is another example. Sometimes, these films take the form of spectacular documentaries: The Hellstrom Chronicles was a lavish technicolor bug movie for entomology "heads' and, similarly, Gregory Reggio's Kooyanisqatsi,and the two similarly titled films that followed it, although ostensibly about how humans affect the balance of nature, were primarily exercises in showing majestic vistas in ways never before seen, mountains majestic and cascades and endless deserts in counterpoint to speeded-up footage of humans swarming in neon-lit cities, all to the churning, hypnotic music of Philip Glass. These films tend to have limited or non-existent commentary -- the viewer is left to his or her own thoughts about what is depicted on screen. It is as if using words to comment on the elemental imagery in these films would somehow distort those pictures or tame them to the audience's comprehension -- the point is not understanding but awe. These sorts of films are manifestations of the sublime -- that is, astonishing beauty coupled with a sense of terror: the images in Aquarela were captured at the risk of life and limb and, therefore, posited as all the more meaningful. Herzog follows in this tradition in his documentaries, but, I think, delivers a superior product because he narrates his films -- we know what we are seeing on screen and, therefore, in my view, appreciate the spectacle more. Kossokovsky works more in the vein of the Harvard Sensory Ethnographic Lab -- this group of filmmakers produces movies without overdubbed narration and has, in fact, achieved several masterpieces in this form, most notably Leviathan (which resembles Aquarela), Sweetwater and the superb Manakamana. Like those films, Kossovkovsky's vision is ideologically pure and purports to be unmediated. But there is, of course, a certain naivety to documentaries of this sort. Throughout the film, the viewer yearns for a little context to better appreciate the spectacle on display.
Aquarela was shot with Arri Flex cameras at 96 frames a second. The film is supposed to be projected at the same rate, although it's my suspicion that when I saw the movie (at the Lagoon Theater in Minneapolis Uptown), the movie was shown at the standard rate of 24 frames a second.. There was no advertisement that the movie was being projected at its proper frame-per-second density and I couldn't detect anything different about the way the film looked -- it is clear and grandiose, but there was nothing surreal about the clarity of the images, something critics who have seen the film at 96 frames a minute have commented on. Even with the image subtly degraded, the quality of the imagery is wonderful. Peter Jackson shot The Hobbit at 48 frames a minute -- without a comparison side-by-side between the 24 and 48 frame per minute versions, I doubt that anyone could see the difference. Without the comparison, I certainly wasn't able to see any difference between what was presented at the Lagoon Theater and what the director intended with the 96 frame per second presentation. Aquarela follows a pattern established as far back in film history as Leni Riefenstahl -- he starts a sequence with images that are merely spectacular, then, the film increases the ante, piling up pictures that become more and more majestic or grandiose until, at last, the footage achieves a hallucinatory, mind-bending intensity -- in effect,the pictorial images go from being spectacular to unbelievable: most of the sequences climax with shots that seem to show us things that are literally impossible. (The pattern for this kind of cutting is the famous diving sequence in Olympia; Riefenstahl shows us divers gracefully plunging from high-boards into the water. But, then, she increases the speed of the cutting, simply shows the bodies arching in flight and, then, reverses the directions between up and down -- at the climax of the diving sequence, the bodies soar upward into the sky, pictorial imagery that is impossible, that defies gravity and, yet, that is intended to display the ideal Platonic essence of diving: an experience of flying through the air.)
Aquarela is about what Goethe called the "biography and life-history of water." The film begins with an extended sequence that is quasi-narrative: at an ice-covered lake between huge barren mountains, cars have broken through the ice. Crews of men with primitive looking capstans and winches are laboring on the ice to try to pull the vehicles to the surface. But the blue crystal of the ice is eroded and there are streams and patches of open water and the workers keep plunging through the wafer-thin ice into the dark, ominous depths of the lake. The film begins with a man on hands and knees cupping his eyes to peer though the ice at a car sunk below. This Herzog territory (his Russian film Bells from the Deep) and the activities of the men, who keep plunging through the ice sheets, seem vaguely comical, although also very dangerous. In the distance, cars merrily zip along a track in the ice, oblivious to the fact that there is a whole sunken parking lot of vehicles that have broken through and been drowned in the lake. We see one car suddenly plunge into the lake with one of its passengers apparently lost in the icy water. On the remote shore, in a classic Herzog-style shot, a barn is brightly burning with no one paying any attention to the fiery conflagration. The film, then, cuts to the fjords of Greenland where we see skycraper-sized icebergs calving off a glacier and plunging into a huge lagoon where flotillas of ice bergs are drifting. As the enormous ice bergs plunge into the lagoon, the film takes on the abstract unreality of Riefenstahl's diving sequence -- the ice, after falling into the water, surges upward and the buoyancy of the ice bergs results in images of colossal mountains of blue and green ice, draining vast waterfalls from their sides, rising up out of the sea. The directions seem to be reversed -- the titanic towers of ice surge upward, surfacing like monsters of the deep, colossal dolphins and whales rising from the lagoon. We see the ice from every possible angle, including extended sequences under water, a diver skirting the edges of vast icy caverns, suffused with dim blue light with the eroded underbellies of the bergs hollow-eyed with depressions and pale indentations. (The scenes underwater were claustrophobic, the camera tilted upward as if to search for an opening in the ice and I found these extended sequences physically unpleasant to watch.) There are shots from drones and helicopters. In one surreal image, we see a vast iceberg alone in the deep blue sea suspended, it seems, on rafts of fog and mist. One iceberg carved like Lohengrin's swan-boat glides by the camera, apparently the size of a battleship: a huge ice giant seems to recline at the stern of the swan boat and there is a sculpted wing about the size of a ten-story skyscraper looming over the dragonish prow of the ice vessel. The film then, shifts to mountainous waves -- a tiny ship is trapped between 500 foot waves with the sailors actually climbing up onto the sail boat masts in the tempest. The waves get bigger and bigger and, at last, they seem to be covered with masks -- the mountainous wall of the wave collapses, dissolves into spray and, behind, we see something that looks like Niagara falls, a huge precipice over which water is falling as if from a cliff -- I have never seen anything like this and it is breathtaking. The director, then, shows us floods. His camera tracks down the empty streets of Miami in a hurricane, scooting over wind-driven water that seems to be four feet deep, palm trees bent over like old crippled men, and the wind hurling projectiles this way and that. We see a graveyard that is underwater with stately egrets standing on their stilt-like legs among ancient gravestones. A dam has burst and enormous torrents of muddy waters surge down a steep embankment (I recognized this imagery as being the Oroville Dam rupture in California). Suddenly, we are underwater in some kind of cave or subterranean tunnel. The cave is full of water that roars like a locomotive past a man. We can only glimpse the man in the torrent of water. He seems to be gesturing and, then, we perceive several other shapes, men and women drenched to the bone, staggering forward through the walls of falling water. Several close-ups show the people's face, inexpressive against curtains of falling water. The film ends with pictorially sublime shots of Angel Falls, the water dropping so far, through veils of rainbow, that it never really reaches the bottom of the cliff -- a perpetual cloud hangs over a dangling delta of jungle from which a river, slate-colored in the afternoon light, emerges. The cliffs thousands of feet above the jungle canopy are rust-red, streaked with cobalt blues and fissured with deep pink ravines and chasms.
The film is dedicated to the great Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov. The only sequence that seemed to me to be related to Solurov's work was the highly enigmatic and inexplicable scenes of the people in the tunnel, buffeted by deadly-looking jets of water. From time to time, the imagery is accompanied by grinding heavy-metal music that is impressive but doesn't exactly fit what we are seeing -- the heavy-metal music seems to much of a nod to "head film" traditions, is too explicit, directly commenting on the violence that we are seeing. This movie will not be to most people's taste. Jack, who saw the film with me, was bored by the perpetual onslaught of water images without any narrative commentary. I'm older and was raised with "head films" and so I thought the movie was wonderful -- but that may be merely the hangover of a psychedelic youth.
Aquarela was shot with Arri Flex cameras at 96 frames a second. The film is supposed to be projected at the same rate, although it's my suspicion that when I saw the movie (at the Lagoon Theater in Minneapolis Uptown), the movie was shown at the standard rate of 24 frames a second.. There was no advertisement that the movie was being projected at its proper frame-per-second density and I couldn't detect anything different about the way the film looked -- it is clear and grandiose, but there was nothing surreal about the clarity of the images, something critics who have seen the film at 96 frames a minute have commented on. Even with the image subtly degraded, the quality of the imagery is wonderful. Peter Jackson shot The Hobbit at 48 frames a minute -- without a comparison side-by-side between the 24 and 48 frame per minute versions, I doubt that anyone could see the difference. Without the comparison, I certainly wasn't able to see any difference between what was presented at the Lagoon Theater and what the director intended with the 96 frame per second presentation. Aquarela follows a pattern established as far back in film history as Leni Riefenstahl -- he starts a sequence with images that are merely spectacular, then, the film increases the ante, piling up pictures that become more and more majestic or grandiose until, at last, the footage achieves a hallucinatory, mind-bending intensity -- in effect,the pictorial images go from being spectacular to unbelievable: most of the sequences climax with shots that seem to show us things that are literally impossible. (The pattern for this kind of cutting is the famous diving sequence in Olympia; Riefenstahl shows us divers gracefully plunging from high-boards into the water. But, then, she increases the speed of the cutting, simply shows the bodies arching in flight and, then, reverses the directions between up and down -- at the climax of the diving sequence, the bodies soar upward into the sky, pictorial imagery that is impossible, that defies gravity and, yet, that is intended to display the ideal Platonic essence of diving: an experience of flying through the air.)
Aquarela is about what Goethe called the "biography and life-history of water." The film begins with an extended sequence that is quasi-narrative: at an ice-covered lake between huge barren mountains, cars have broken through the ice. Crews of men with primitive looking capstans and winches are laboring on the ice to try to pull the vehicles to the surface. But the blue crystal of the ice is eroded and there are streams and patches of open water and the workers keep plunging through the wafer-thin ice into the dark, ominous depths of the lake. The film begins with a man on hands and knees cupping his eyes to peer though the ice at a car sunk below. This Herzog territory (his Russian film Bells from the Deep) and the activities of the men, who keep plunging through the ice sheets, seem vaguely comical, although also very dangerous. In the distance, cars merrily zip along a track in the ice, oblivious to the fact that there is a whole sunken parking lot of vehicles that have broken through and been drowned in the lake. We see one car suddenly plunge into the lake with one of its passengers apparently lost in the icy water. On the remote shore, in a classic Herzog-style shot, a barn is brightly burning with no one paying any attention to the fiery conflagration. The film, then, cuts to the fjords of Greenland where we see skycraper-sized icebergs calving off a glacier and plunging into a huge lagoon where flotillas of ice bergs are drifting. As the enormous ice bergs plunge into the lagoon, the film takes on the abstract unreality of Riefenstahl's diving sequence -- the ice, after falling into the water, surges upward and the buoyancy of the ice bergs results in images of colossal mountains of blue and green ice, draining vast waterfalls from their sides, rising up out of the sea. The directions seem to be reversed -- the titanic towers of ice surge upward, surfacing like monsters of the deep, colossal dolphins and whales rising from the lagoon. We see the ice from every possible angle, including extended sequences under water, a diver skirting the edges of vast icy caverns, suffused with dim blue light with the eroded underbellies of the bergs hollow-eyed with depressions and pale indentations. (The scenes underwater were claustrophobic, the camera tilted upward as if to search for an opening in the ice and I found these extended sequences physically unpleasant to watch.) There are shots from drones and helicopters. In one surreal image, we see a vast iceberg alone in the deep blue sea suspended, it seems, on rafts of fog and mist. One iceberg carved like Lohengrin's swan-boat glides by the camera, apparently the size of a battleship: a huge ice giant seems to recline at the stern of the swan boat and there is a sculpted wing about the size of a ten-story skyscraper looming over the dragonish prow of the ice vessel. The film then, shifts to mountainous waves -- a tiny ship is trapped between 500 foot waves with the sailors actually climbing up onto the sail boat masts in the tempest. The waves get bigger and bigger and, at last, they seem to be covered with masks -- the mountainous wall of the wave collapses, dissolves into spray and, behind, we see something that looks like Niagara falls, a huge precipice over which water is falling as if from a cliff -- I have never seen anything like this and it is breathtaking. The director, then, shows us floods. His camera tracks down the empty streets of Miami in a hurricane, scooting over wind-driven water that seems to be four feet deep, palm trees bent over like old crippled men, and the wind hurling projectiles this way and that. We see a graveyard that is underwater with stately egrets standing on their stilt-like legs among ancient gravestones. A dam has burst and enormous torrents of muddy waters surge down a steep embankment (I recognized this imagery as being the Oroville Dam rupture in California). Suddenly, we are underwater in some kind of cave or subterranean tunnel. The cave is full of water that roars like a locomotive past a man. We can only glimpse the man in the torrent of water. He seems to be gesturing and, then, we perceive several other shapes, men and women drenched to the bone, staggering forward through the walls of falling water. Several close-ups show the people's face, inexpressive against curtains of falling water. The film ends with pictorially sublime shots of Angel Falls, the water dropping so far, through veils of rainbow, that it never really reaches the bottom of the cliff -- a perpetual cloud hangs over a dangling delta of jungle from which a river, slate-colored in the afternoon light, emerges. The cliffs thousands of feet above the jungle canopy are rust-red, streaked with cobalt blues and fissured with deep pink ravines and chasms.
The film is dedicated to the great Russian filmmaker Alexander Sokurov. The only sequence that seemed to me to be related to Solurov's work was the highly enigmatic and inexplicable scenes of the people in the tunnel, buffeted by deadly-looking jets of water. From time to time, the imagery is accompanied by grinding heavy-metal music that is impressive but doesn't exactly fit what we are seeing -- the heavy-metal music seems to much of a nod to "head film" traditions, is too explicit, directly commenting on the violence that we are seeing. This movie will not be to most people's taste. Jack, who saw the film with me, was bored by the perpetual onslaught of water images without any narrative commentary. I'm older and was raised with "head films" and so I thought the movie was wonderful -- but that may be merely the hangover of a psychedelic youth.
Sunday, September 8, 2019
The Sisters Brothers
The Sisters Brothers (2018) in keeping with its baffling name, is a gloomy and muddled Western, shot mostly in Aragon and Navarre, Spain with some riparian terrain in Rumania standing in for Sierra Nevada foothills. (As far as I can determine, the interiors and street scenes were shot in Belgium.) Audiard has no idea how to make a Western and, seemingly, no appreciation for the genre. (It probably doesn't help that the movie is produced by a Babel of European companies and that the morose and pessimistic Dardennes Brothers are among them.) The credits show, at least, seven consultants on weapons and, probably, 25 horse specialists -- but the resulting film demonstrates that these hordes of experts don't result in anything that looks plausibly authentic. There's an immediate tip-off in the first few scenes showing men on horseback -- the horses always seem to be galloping at an uncomfortably fast speed. (Before putting in the DVD, I caught a few scenes from a third-rate American Western starring John Wayne -- Rooster Cogburn released in 1975. The Hollywood movie isn't much good, but, at least, the scenes involving horses look plausible -- the actors are comfortable in the saddle and you don't get the sense that they are making the horse's run just for effect. Obviously, John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as the titular characters weren't groomed making Westerns -- they don't have the ease and skill of actors like Randolph Scott or Tim Conway or any of the stable of performers who worked for John Ford or Budd Boettcher.) It's unfair to criticize The Sisters Brothers on the basis of its highfalutin' European origins -- after all, Sergio Leone made some of the greatest Westerns, fully comparable and, often, superior to American films, shooting, by and large, in southern Spain; similarly, Valeska Griesbach's Western shot in Bulgaria is a worthy interpretation of the genre. The problem with The Sisters Brothers is that it's a lousy movie -- the script is awful and the film is so perversely shot and edited that the viewer, generally, can't figure out what is happening or why.
The film's premise is that two badly damaged men are employed as paid assassins by a shadowy figure who lives in a mansion with a big heraldic coat of arms over the front door -- the sort of showy palace where bad guys reside. This villain is called simply "The Commodore" -- he's an enigmatic presence similar to the Judge in Cormac McCathy's Blood Meridian. In fact, Blood Meridian, as a revisionist Western novel written in the mode and style of Melville's Moby Dick, looms mightily over the narrative in Audiard's film -- like the Judge, the Commodore, is sort of a stand-in for the Great White Whale, God, and what ever else you might want to project onto the figure. The two Sisters Brothers, traumatized by an awful childhood (the younger more psychotic brother played by Phoenix has murdered their abusive, alcoholic father) are dispatched to kidnap a chemist. The chemist who is en route to the goldfields in the Sierra Nevada is played by Riz Ahmed -- he has developed a chemical that when poured into a river reacts with the gold and causes the nuggets to glow with an unearthly light. (This magical elixir is problematic on a number of grounds -- first, gold is valuable precisely because it is non-reactive; hence, the elixir works exactly on the basis of a quality that gold doesn't possess. Second, the film maker and the scenarist obviously don't know anything about how gold is mined or the geology of the ore's presentation as a placer mineral.) Another of the Commodore's henchmen, played by a mumbling Jake Gyllenhaal has also been sent to detain the chemist so that the Sisters Brothers, renowned gunfighters and assassins, can torture the secret formula out of the man. Gyllenhaal's characters succumbs to the charms of the handsome and soft-spoken chemist and joins with him in an effort to escape the dogged pursuit by the Sisters brothers. After several pointless gun battles, the boys catch-up with the chemist and the "scout" as Gyllenhaal is called. They decide to betray the Commodore, use the chemical to harvest the gold from a mountain stream, and, then, escape as wealthy men. But here a rather tedious and pretentious allegory intervenes. The chemical that reveals the gold lurking in the stream bed is highly caustic. Somehow or another, too much chemical is poured into the river with the result that the poor inventor of the formula burns himself so badly that he dies. Gyllenhaal is also horribly burned by the caustic and commits suicide to escape the pain. The psychotic younger Sisters brother has to have his right (gun) hand sawed-off due to horrible burns to that extremity. Now, the Commodore is dispatching hordes of assassins that the lads have to kill in ineptly choreographed gun-battles. The two brothers turn their horses north to Oregon City intent upon killing the Commodore. But the Commodore cheats them of their vengeance. He dies and, when the heavily armed boys burst into his mansion, the man is lying in his coffin. (The undertaker notes that no one has attended the funeral and wonders if they will authorize him to close the coffin, something that is accomplished after the elder Sisters brother belts the corpse in the chops a couple times.) Older but wiser, the Sisters brothers go home to their mother and a sort of happy ending ensues.
A curious aspect of this film is the director's inability (or unwillingness) to shoot his scenes in a way that makes the action intelligible. It's a bad sign when the opening scene features lots of showy muzzle flashes in total darkness and, then, a bunch a corpses lying around in a farmhouse with gun men lurking here and there, popping up like moles in Whack--a-Mole to be gunned down. A stables burns and horses lit on fire run free in the night. The flaming horse is a spectacular apparition but Audiard is completely uninterested in showing who lit the stables on fire, or why or when or how. In the climactic confrontation that turns out to be with the corpse of the Commodore, we see one brother decisively stalking along a porch going right with the camera tracking on him; then, we see a matching shot of the other brother going the other way on a similar porch. Why in the world have the brothers split up to approach a common destination? Is this some sort of clever stratagem? But the next shot shows the brothers marching together into the Commodore's mansion, elbow to elbow. So what was the point of the showy tracking shots in which they seemed to be going in completely opposite directions to completely different destinations? In the key scene in which too much of the caustic chemical gets spilled into a moonlit creek, we can't tell who is doing what or why this happens. It's completely incoherent. Again and again, the camera moves in a way to suggest that we are purposefully being led to see something -- but the shot just ends pointlessly cut to an image of one of the characters entering the frame from an angle or side geometrically inconsistent with where the figure was last seen. There are whole sequences that are implausible and make no sense at all. In one scene, a fat pregnant-looking spider appears out of nowhere. The spider crawls over something -- we don't know what: the bug looks comically gravid as opposed to menacing. We are then shown John C. Reilly sleeping; he snore with his mouth open. The arachnid, then, crawls into his mouth. (I don't think any spider in the history of the world has been this dim-witted: spiders generally try to avoid ending up in a larger creature's mouth.) This lead to a bunch of scenes in which John C. Reilly experiences the pangs of the damned -- his mouth and face get picturesquely swollen and, later, he actually seems to vomit blood with spiderlings in it. (Did the spider lay eggs in his cheek or what?) The entire sequence is completely ridiculous and contributes nothing to the narrative. Furthermore, it's shot in a confusing and poorly edited manner -- if you think back on 1962's Dr No, an old James Bond movies in which the sleeping Sean Connery is menaced by a tarantula, you will recall that there is a distinct code to how these sequences should be shot and edited: that is, a way to frame the man and the spider so as to create suspense. Audiard seems completely ignorant of these predecessor films. He has a pre- D. W. Griffith sense of mise-en-scene. Westerns involve space and clearly delineated action -- think of the parallel cutting in Monument Valley, for instance, of the Indians riding along side but apart from the cavalry in Fort Apache. You know at all times the disposition of the forces and where they are located with respect to one another. Audiard doesn't understand this at all. Furthermore, since he has no graphic sense, he also has no idea how to build a scene toward a climax. In one sequence, the two brothers quarrel in an expensive hotel restaurant in San Francisco. Suddenly, one of them jumps up and hits the other brother. We are as surprised as the aghast patrons of the restaurant -- the dialogue hitherto has been so bland, inert, and vapid that it is impossible to understand why the fight happened. Nothing was said that wasn't said a dozen times before. At one point, poor John C. Reilly has to say that "we have yet some of our youth". No he doesn't. He looks very old, tired, broken-down, at least 60 -- there's a lot of footage with his shirt off that's not particularly flattering to our hero: he has a pot-belly and man-boobs (nothing like the shirtless Brad Pitt in Once upon a Time in Hollywood). In the reunion scene at the end, Reilly's character looks as old or older than his mother.
The film has a pretentious theme: greed versus an ideology of proto-Marxist Communism espoused by Riz Ahmed's chemist (who, nonetheless, succumbs literally to greed when the caustic gold-finding elixir scalds him to death). There's not one line in the movie that seems authentic to the time and place -- 1851 Oregon. Poor old Rutger Hauer (may he rest in peace) gets to play the Commodore in his casket and is punched in the dead nose a couple of times by the hero. The titles tell us that the film was made "with the participation of Rutger Hauer".
The film's premise is that two badly damaged men are employed as paid assassins by a shadowy figure who lives in a mansion with a big heraldic coat of arms over the front door -- the sort of showy palace where bad guys reside. This villain is called simply "The Commodore" -- he's an enigmatic presence similar to the Judge in Cormac McCathy's Blood Meridian. In fact, Blood Meridian, as a revisionist Western novel written in the mode and style of Melville's Moby Dick, looms mightily over the narrative in Audiard's film -- like the Judge, the Commodore, is sort of a stand-in for the Great White Whale, God, and what ever else you might want to project onto the figure. The two Sisters Brothers, traumatized by an awful childhood (the younger more psychotic brother played by Phoenix has murdered their abusive, alcoholic father) are dispatched to kidnap a chemist. The chemist who is en route to the goldfields in the Sierra Nevada is played by Riz Ahmed -- he has developed a chemical that when poured into a river reacts with the gold and causes the nuggets to glow with an unearthly light. (This magical elixir is problematic on a number of grounds -- first, gold is valuable precisely because it is non-reactive; hence, the elixir works exactly on the basis of a quality that gold doesn't possess. Second, the film maker and the scenarist obviously don't know anything about how gold is mined or the geology of the ore's presentation as a placer mineral.) Another of the Commodore's henchmen, played by a mumbling Jake Gyllenhaal has also been sent to detain the chemist so that the Sisters Brothers, renowned gunfighters and assassins, can torture the secret formula out of the man. Gyllenhaal's characters succumbs to the charms of the handsome and soft-spoken chemist and joins with him in an effort to escape the dogged pursuit by the Sisters brothers. After several pointless gun battles, the boys catch-up with the chemist and the "scout" as Gyllenhaal is called. They decide to betray the Commodore, use the chemical to harvest the gold from a mountain stream, and, then, escape as wealthy men. But here a rather tedious and pretentious allegory intervenes. The chemical that reveals the gold lurking in the stream bed is highly caustic. Somehow or another, too much chemical is poured into the river with the result that the poor inventor of the formula burns himself so badly that he dies. Gyllenhaal is also horribly burned by the caustic and commits suicide to escape the pain. The psychotic younger Sisters brother has to have his right (gun) hand sawed-off due to horrible burns to that extremity. Now, the Commodore is dispatching hordes of assassins that the lads have to kill in ineptly choreographed gun-battles. The two brothers turn their horses north to Oregon City intent upon killing the Commodore. But the Commodore cheats them of their vengeance. He dies and, when the heavily armed boys burst into his mansion, the man is lying in his coffin. (The undertaker notes that no one has attended the funeral and wonders if they will authorize him to close the coffin, something that is accomplished after the elder Sisters brother belts the corpse in the chops a couple times.) Older but wiser, the Sisters brothers go home to their mother and a sort of happy ending ensues.
A curious aspect of this film is the director's inability (or unwillingness) to shoot his scenes in a way that makes the action intelligible. It's a bad sign when the opening scene features lots of showy muzzle flashes in total darkness and, then, a bunch a corpses lying around in a farmhouse with gun men lurking here and there, popping up like moles in Whack--a-Mole to be gunned down. A stables burns and horses lit on fire run free in the night. The flaming horse is a spectacular apparition but Audiard is completely uninterested in showing who lit the stables on fire, or why or when or how. In the climactic confrontation that turns out to be with the corpse of the Commodore, we see one brother decisively stalking along a porch going right with the camera tracking on him; then, we see a matching shot of the other brother going the other way on a similar porch. Why in the world have the brothers split up to approach a common destination? Is this some sort of clever stratagem? But the next shot shows the brothers marching together into the Commodore's mansion, elbow to elbow. So what was the point of the showy tracking shots in which they seemed to be going in completely opposite directions to completely different destinations? In the key scene in which too much of the caustic chemical gets spilled into a moonlit creek, we can't tell who is doing what or why this happens. It's completely incoherent. Again and again, the camera moves in a way to suggest that we are purposefully being led to see something -- but the shot just ends pointlessly cut to an image of one of the characters entering the frame from an angle or side geometrically inconsistent with where the figure was last seen. There are whole sequences that are implausible and make no sense at all. In one scene, a fat pregnant-looking spider appears out of nowhere. The spider crawls over something -- we don't know what: the bug looks comically gravid as opposed to menacing. We are then shown John C. Reilly sleeping; he snore with his mouth open. The arachnid, then, crawls into his mouth. (I don't think any spider in the history of the world has been this dim-witted: spiders generally try to avoid ending up in a larger creature's mouth.) This lead to a bunch of scenes in which John C. Reilly experiences the pangs of the damned -- his mouth and face get picturesquely swollen and, later, he actually seems to vomit blood with spiderlings in it. (Did the spider lay eggs in his cheek or what?) The entire sequence is completely ridiculous and contributes nothing to the narrative. Furthermore, it's shot in a confusing and poorly edited manner -- if you think back on 1962's Dr No, an old James Bond movies in which the sleeping Sean Connery is menaced by a tarantula, you will recall that there is a distinct code to how these sequences should be shot and edited: that is, a way to frame the man and the spider so as to create suspense. Audiard seems completely ignorant of these predecessor films. He has a pre- D. W. Griffith sense of mise-en-scene. Westerns involve space and clearly delineated action -- think of the parallel cutting in Monument Valley, for instance, of the Indians riding along side but apart from the cavalry in Fort Apache. You know at all times the disposition of the forces and where they are located with respect to one another. Audiard doesn't understand this at all. Furthermore, since he has no graphic sense, he also has no idea how to build a scene toward a climax. In one sequence, the two brothers quarrel in an expensive hotel restaurant in San Francisco. Suddenly, one of them jumps up and hits the other brother. We are as surprised as the aghast patrons of the restaurant -- the dialogue hitherto has been so bland, inert, and vapid that it is impossible to understand why the fight happened. Nothing was said that wasn't said a dozen times before. At one point, poor John C. Reilly has to say that "we have yet some of our youth". No he doesn't. He looks very old, tired, broken-down, at least 60 -- there's a lot of footage with his shirt off that's not particularly flattering to our hero: he has a pot-belly and man-boobs (nothing like the shirtless Brad Pitt in Once upon a Time in Hollywood). In the reunion scene at the end, Reilly's character looks as old or older than his mother.
The film has a pretentious theme: greed versus an ideology of proto-Marxist Communism espoused by Riz Ahmed's chemist (who, nonetheless, succumbs literally to greed when the caustic gold-finding elixir scalds him to death). There's not one line in the movie that seems authentic to the time and place -- 1851 Oregon. Poor old Rutger Hauer (may he rest in peace) gets to play the Commodore in his casket and is punched in the dead nose a couple of times by the hero. The titles tell us that the film was made "with the participation of Rutger Hauer".
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