Where now are the dreams of youth

Yasujiro Ozu began making films for Shochiku Studios in the late twenties, directing several gangster pictures quite unlike the family dramas that made him famous later in his career.  (As Wim Wenders has noted Ozu made the same film or several films over and over again in the late forties and through to his last picture in 1963 -- the moves are all, more or less alike, and all good.)  He was late to adopt sound, making silent pictures until 1936.  Where now are the dreams of youth, released in 1932, is thought to be transitional -- it begins as a genre film, a college comedy, and, then, turns into something, much darker and more disturbing.  Ozu has no real interest in violence and his later films don't even have any quarrels or contentious dialogue in them -- conflict is shown by averted eyes, disapproving glances, and uncomfortable silences.  Where now are the dreams of youth, by contrast, is shockingly violent -- there is an extended scene at the film's climax that is almost too terrible to watch.  The light tone that prevails in the first half of the film has turned into something literally much darker -- the penultimate scene is staged on a dark road and shot so that it is difficult to see:  perhaps, this strategy was adopted to soften the scene's violence, but it doesn't have that effect -- the crepuscular setting, like something out of Waiting for Godot, if anything makes thing more disturbing.

The movie begins as a campus comedy, influenced by American films, primarily, it seems, Harold Lloyd pictures.  Four friends are studying economics at "P" university -- they all wear sweaters marked with this initial.  We see a strange pep rally underway, depicted by tracking shots at tatami (that is, sitting) level that show the students engaged in grotesque gyrations.  An absent-minded student reads an economics book while wandering around campus -- this is Mr. Seiki, the hardest-working of all students  on campus but to no avail because his professor says that he has "the mind of a thirteen-year old".  There's a fat kid, who is the campus clown, and a boy with a pompadour.  The fourth student is Tetsuo Hironi, the scion of a wealthy trading family.  Tetsuo, who is wealthy is the leader of the group.  He is courted by Shige, the barmaid at the Blue Hawaii Bakery -- it looks to me to be a beer joint.  Shige clearly likes Tetsuo and we see him mending a tear in his tee-shirt.  There's a big poster for Hell's Angels, the 1930 aviation film directed by Howard Hugh's on the wall of Blue Hawaii -- at other crucial scenes, American movie posters engage in an ironic commentary on the film 's action.  The boys play a few pranks and, then, we see them sitting for an exam in economics -- all of them are cheating in one way or another, something that the film shows without disapproval, and, even, it seems with some enthusiasm.  In the middle of the exam, Tetsuo is called home.  His father has collapsed from a stroke and he must now run the family business with his brother, a pompous stuffed-shirt.  (The brother makes a long speech to employees on the arrival of the young man at the business -- Tetsuo simply says:  "I'll be counting on you all like pops did.")  A subplot, typical of Ozu's later concerns, involves efforts of the brother to find a suitable mate for Tetsuo -- the priggish brother doesn't approve of Shige, the barmaid.  A blind date is set up with a westernized society girl who announces that "a man's reckless ways are irresistable particularly when he is drunk" and that "(Tetsuo's) deranged character excites me."  But, when Tetsuo shows up, indeed, very drunk and uses the flapper's purse for an ash-tray she flees him in disgust.  (Tetsuo has been drinking with his elderly uncle, a typical Ozu reprobate, who is  half-naked, wears a wet cloth on his head against the heat, drinks like a fish and smokes as well -- Ozu was, apparently, a working alcoholic himself and his scenes showing people getting drunk have merry, brilliantly observed resonance.)   After a year working at the family business, Tetsuo goes back to the campus and helps his three friends finally pass their economics test, with more cheating of the kind the picture seems to endorse-- Tetsuo has got the answers from obsequious professor and simply slipped them to his buddies.  After his friends finally graduate, Tetsuo hires them to work in his company, hoping to maintain the old sense of college camaraderie although he is now their employer.  On another catastrophic date set up by his brother, Tetsuo sees his old girlfriend Shige who is moving to a new apartment.  He is happy to encounter her and, in fact, loads up his limousine with her humble property, in effect, walling off the flapper that he is supposed to be courting (she flees).  At her new apartment, Tetsuo is assisting her with unpacking when the hapless Mr. Seiki appears, carrying a bouquet of flowers.  He has been wooing Shige and she has, in fact, agreed to marry him.  Tetsuo takes his buddies out for a drink in Ginza and announces that he intends to marry Shige -- Mr. Seiki is smitten by the news but holds his tongue.  He has become financially dependent on Tetsuo and, in fact, is supporting his elderly mother with money from the job at Hironi enterprises -- in fact, Mr. Seiki's mother gives Tetsuo a little gift and tells him that she prays to him "like a god." It takes Tetsuo a while to figure out that Shige and the very retiring and humble Mr. Seiki are engaged.  He confronts Shige who tells him that she has agreed to marry Mr. Seiki because "no one else wants him" and loves him out of pity.  (This seems a peculiar motivation for a marriage but it is accepted by everyone in the film as completely rational and, even, admirable.)  Shige says that Tetsuo didn't contact her for a year and she grew tired waiting for him, although she admits that she loved him earlier.  Tetsuo is now enraged.  He invites his three friends to another drinking party in Ginza and, then, as they walk home through a strange, dark wasteland, he confronts Mr. Seiki.  He says that Mr.Seiki has been acting like a "puppy" and not a man and that he has disgraced their friendship by not fighting for Shige.  Tetsuo tries to provoke Mr. Seiki into a fight by slapping him, but he refuses to raise a hand.  Then, Tetsuo says that he will show him the "fists of friendship" and begins punching him violently in the side of the face and head.  Mr.  Seiki just stands there and Tetsuo goes on punching with full force for what seems like an eternity until the man falls to his knees.  Tetsuo announces that he will not marry Shige and pulls the battered Mr. Seiki up to his feet.  All of this takes place in a dark barren landscape in the middle of what looks like a gravel road.  In the final scene, it is bright and sunny -- Tetsuo and two of his friends are throwing around a baseball on top of a skyscraper.  We see a train in which Mr. Seiki and Shige are sitting.  They are going on their honeymoon.  The landscapes shoot past.  On the rooftop, Tetsuo and his buddies see the train and wave to it.  (It's pretty clear that they are too far away to actually see anyone on the train.)  As the train passes the skyscraper, Mr. Seiki and Shige wave as well -- although the cutting is discontinuous and we don't have any sense that either of the two parties can see one another:  the waving is purely symbolic, showing that affinity between friends remains notwithstanding distance.

Like many of Ozu's films, the picture starts in such an unassuming and elliptical way so that nothing much seems to be happening.  Then, all of a sudden a plot is visible and we come to care deeply about the characters; the acting in this movie is naturalistic and impeccable.  The movie is wholly successful and very ingenious -- the subplot involving Tetsuo's romantic adventures fits very neatly into the larger narrative.  In his later movies, Ozu almost never moves the camera -- here, he uses, at least, a dozen showy tracking shots, generally motivated as the vantage from a moving car or train.  These shots are very effective and suggest that if Ozu had followed his early interest in the moving camera he would have become a master of that effect, somewhat like Max Ophuls.  There are none of his signature "empty frames", that is, still life images charged with narrative force in that they show the absence of a character.  But he does use still life close-ups and there is a particularly impressive scene showing the men leaving the Ginza bar that is cut with a vehement cubist-style force:  we see feet, bottles, everything jumbled together in a collage of a dozen or so shots punctuating the film as the men leave and walk with the camera tracking beside them to the climactic confrontation.  Where now are the dreams of youth is an excellent movie, although the viewer needs to be patient -- the mild campus comedy, although important as a contrast to the dark tone later in the film, isn't particularly engaging, at least, at first.  TCM, showing the film as part of its Silent Sunday Nights series presented a reasonably clear version of the film, but wholly without musical soundtrack -- I believe that Japanese silent films were narrated by professionals who described the action and, then, read the titles, imitating the various characters with their voices.  These film-narrators, so-called Benshi, allow Japanese pictures to be more elliptical and indirect in their narrative practices, since the Benshi could be counted on to explain the action and the relationships between the characters.  But no musical score was commissioned for these silent films.  Accordingly, Ozu's picture was shown without an accompaniment -- this is also an obstacle to enjoying a movie of this sort.    

The Cave of the Yellow Dog (and the TCM series "Women Make Film")

There aren't a lot of trees on display in Byamsuren Davaa's Cave of the Yellow Dog (2005), a gentle film about a family of nomads in Mongolia.  The Batchuluums live in an elegant-looking yurt on windy, completely barren grasslands several hours trip by motorcycle from the nearest town.  They herd sheep and goats and own a couple of cows from which they get milk to make some kind of white tubular cheese.  The film has a very simple, if classical, plot:  a little girl finds a small dog, takes it home, and encounters her father's disapproval at harboring the animal (he thinks the dog has somehow been corrupted by wolves and is a menace to his flock of sheep -- this notion is just dumb, but its par for the course for the adults in this picture.)  The little girl hides the dog from her parents.  There are a few minor adventures and, then, the family leaves its campground, possibly to depart for the city -- the old nomadic ways of life are passing away.  The dog, abandoned at the family's former campsite, proves his mettle by saving a child and is rewarded by being made a permanent part of the family.  In the last shot, the nomads trudge into the sunset while a truck drives by them, blasting out bullhorn admonitions to vote.  The film is 93 minutes long, very carefully observed, and spectacularly shot -- the nomads on their tough little ponies are tiny figures in an enormous landscape of stormy purplish skies, endless rolling prairies wet with shallow lakes and where rivers flow in stony, tube-like valleys; you can see forever and there are big greyish mountains with rocky summits sprawled against the horizon.  The inside of the yurt is a riot of color, intricate red and yellow decorations painted on cabinets, glazed ceramic buddhas, and a sort of family altar sporting a snapshot of the Dalai Lama, some lamps in which to burn oil, and pictures of relatives all arrayed against a colorful fabric background.  Against the vast indifference of nature, human life is regarded as the most precious of all things -- an old lady pours rice over a needle and says that re-birth as a human being is as rare as a speck of rice balancing on the point of that needle.  The little girl's mother asks her seven-year old daughter to bite her own palm, an impossible act, and, then, says that there are some things that are as near to you as your own hands but that can't be accomplished -- as Mick Jagger reminds us:  "You can't always get what you want."  During a thunderstorm in which the little girl has sought shelter with her grandmother, the old woman tells her the story of the yellow dog, put to death in a cave, so that another girl could overcome her illness and live.  In the opening shot, at twilight, the shadowy figure of a herdsman and child carry a dead dog onto the top of a high hill and, when the father puts the dog's tail under its head, he says that "perhaps, the dog will be reborn as a human with a pigtail."  The dog, Zochor (it means something like "Spot") has a strange characteristic -- he seems narcoleptic and simply drops over asleep.  The child speculates that the dog was a "lazybones" in his prior life and still shows evidence of this now.  The child's mother tells her that only very small children can recall their previous lives -- this is why they say "surprising things."  The sheep are threatened by wolves -- the "children of the night" howl impressively in the darkness -- and there are also hideous buzzards loitering around the flock that fight over scraps of carrion and circle overhead.  A shot of a horrible-looking buzzard, all shaggy with black and dusty feathers, hopping like a figure from a nightmare toward a toddler is one of the most frightening images that I've seen in a long time.  The movie is not acted so much as observed -- the filmmaker, a Mongolian woman who makes her home in Berlin, lived with the Batchulum family for six months, gaining their trust, before bringing her German crew out onto the steppe to shoot the film.  Everything seems natural, unforced, and true. 

This is the sort of film that I would like to praise, but, in fact, its not very good and somewhat tedious.  The story is too slight to sustain the film and there are pointless, if disturbing, digressions.  People will project onto the nomads aspirational qualities -- they are exemplars, for instance, of environmental virtue and show us how to live "lightly" on the earth.  (They collect and burn dung for fuel, it seems, although they also have some modern technology -- the father drives a motorcycle over the trackless steppes and a wind turbine runs a generator that supplies power to brightly light their yurt.  The little girl attends boarding school in the City and, when she stacks up patties of petrified cow dung while playing with her smaller sister, she say that she is mimicking a skyscraper where people live in "yurts piled one atop another" and even can "pee inside their houses."  The dung collecting seems to be just a plot convention to get the little girl out of the encampment so that she can find the dog -- the nomads don't really seem to have much use for the stuff which the movie shows us is very hard to ignite.)  The film traffics in the idea that the nomads are noble savages who show us how to live in accord with nature -- or, at least, some people who watch the movie apparently derive that message from it -- this was the argument made the TCM commentators on the film.  But the simple fact is that the nomads seem to be extremely dim-witted and negligent and, when one pierces through the veneer of poetry, the plot seems to celebrate something very close to child abuse.  In the middle of the film, Davaa kills time with an episode in which the seven-year-old girl is sent out onto the steppes on a pony to herd the flocks of sheep.  The area in which the film takes place is about the size of Wyoming and much more empty and the little girl is given only one instruction:  "keep the mountain peak in sight."  Needless to say, she gets lost in the wilderness at nightfall when a deadly-looking thunderstorm is approaching.  The film posits the wasteland as full of ravening wolves and nasty buzzards and there are some rather stupid seeming hunters who appear from time-to-time -- they are blasting away at wolves.  In one scene during the sequence, the child peers over a cliff, looking down toward the river that is about 200 feet straight below her.  It seems completely unreasonable to send a small child on horseback out into this kind of vast and dangerous terrain and, of course, almost immediately the little kid gets lost and finds herself in peril.  At the climax of the film, the nomad family comprised of mom and dad and the three children, the smallest a toddler who seems to be about two years old, depart from their camp.  They travel about five miles, crossing over a big bridge on the river, before they discover that they have left behind the little boy.  How exactly do you leave a child behind in a howling wasteland full of predatory animals?  It's not as if the nomads have a lot of people to supervise -- there are only three children and, yet, incredibly they leave the baby behind.  This pattern of carelessness suggests that the members of the nomad family are either negligent to an extraordinary degree or fools.   When the little girl gets lost on the prairie, mom has to ride about ten miles to find her -- leaving behind a four-year old and the little boy in the yurt, a place full of all sorts of household hazards including electrical connections, matches, and candles.  (Dad has gone to town to trade some sheep skins for a ladle, a flashlight, and a mechanical battery-operated toy dog; later, the wife, distracted when another kid goes missing, leaves the plastic ladle in her  heated propane-fired wok and the thing gets melted down).  The last shot exemplifies what is wrong with the movie:  in an elegiac image, the family trudges along toward the horizon, all of their possessions loaded on three wagons drawn by their oxen.  About forty feet to the side of the path that they are taking is a fairly well-maintained dirt road.  Immediately, the alert viewer asks:  "Why aren't the nomads using the road as opposed to dragging their gear through the open prairie?"  A truck comes over the horizon, someone bellowing through a loudspeaker that the people should vote.  So we assume that the nomads have moved aside, perhaps, to allow the truck to pass -- although the truck isn't really visible throughout the first part of the shot.  After the truck has driven out of the frame, we expect the nomads to move onto the road -- certainly, this would be an easier path to follow.  But the film here seems to be making some kind of symbolic point at the expense of its characters -- they are taking the "other way", that is eschewing the modern road for the path through the pathless steppe.  A herdsman appears (who is he? where was he hiding?) and drives the flock of sheep and goats forward and, quite sensibly, the herd uses the road -- it's easier to walk there.  But, in the distance, the nomads are stubbornly plowing their way through the deep grass.  The effect is that we conclude that the hapless nomads are dumber than their animals -- the sheep and goats know enough to walk on the road, why not the humans?

I wanted to admire this film for its grit and interesting ethnography.  But the pattern of egregious carelessness and stupidity shown by the film's principal characters, once recognized, makes this impossible for me.  If a human re-birth is so rare and if our lives are so ineffably precious, then why don't the nomads take better care of their children?

Turner Classic Movies showed this rare film, a German-Mongolian co-production, as part of its Tuesday night series Women Make Film -- a collection of movies directed by women, almost all of which are unknown to me.  The films are accompanied by a documentary by Mark Cousins (narrated by Tilda Swinton) in which film clips showing various aspects of movie-making are presented -- all of the clips come from movies directed by women.  Cousins' descriptions of the film clips exemplifying such topics as framing, staging, camera movement, composition and so on, are superficial but the footage that he presents come from interesting films that aren't generally available.  Cousins has the name of the Soviet director Kira Muratova tattooed on his arm and she is a particular hero to him.  (I've seen a couple of pictures by Muratova and her work is really extraordinary -- I hope that the series will provide access to some of her films, movies that are close to impossible to access.)  Cousins tells you everything about the film techniques that he highlights except what is worth knowing -- that is, how a particular effect creates a particular mood or system of meanings that is relevant to the movie in which the effect is used.  For instance, he shows us elaborate dollying and tracking shots, praising their virtuosity but wholly neglects to explain why the director implemented these complex and intricate maneuvers in the first place.  That said, the show is fascinating because it introduces viewers to foreign films that are obscure and, yet, have interest -- from the evidence on display, India and Iran have produced many interesting women directors as has the old Soviet Union.  The films of these women deserve closer study.  There is always a thrill about encountering, as it were, an undiscovered country in movies by directors who were apparently prolific but whose films haven't been shown in the United States. (American female directors are represented by some silent film makers, such as Alice Guy-Blache and Lois Weber, as well as Elaine May and Barbara Loden together with some noisy garbage directed by Katherine Bigelow the auteur of such things as The Hurt Locker and Point Break.)  Cousins' documentary is gimmicky -- it's posited as a road movie with interpolated and pointless images shot through the dashboard of a moving car (the scene shifts from mountains to deserts to rainforests) serving as punctuation.  But it's educational in the best sense -- he introduces us to films and directors hitherto unknown to most viewers.  Furthermore, the Cousins' documentary series is accompanied by some of the films referenced in each episode.  This is how the Cave of the Yellow Dog made its way onto prime-time TV as well as even more exotic and mysterious fare.  (I was vaguely aware of the director of the Cave; she won an award, a Silver Bear, I think at the Berlin Film Festival, for a movie called The Story of the Weeping Camel, also about Mongolian herdsmen.)  In any event, Cousins' documentary series is painless and worth watching with a pencil to note directors and films that he recommends and it is presented with some of the films praised in the series, most of which are extremely rare and little-known.  

Warlock

David Bordwell in his recent book Reinventing Hollywood, How 1940s Filmmakers changed Movie Storytelling argues that, between 1940 and 1955, Hollywood screenwriters and producers complicated their films by introducing intricate flashfoward and flashback structures (with some flashbacks misleading or, even, flat-out untrue), employed multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, and orchestrated movies comprised of several different and incongruent subplots, all with a view toward making cinema more "adult" and intellectually demanding.  Edward Dmytryk's 1959 Warlock, although it falls outside the period of time considered by Bordwell in his book, exemplifies this tendency toward ever-increasing and baroque complexity.  Warlock is a Western, a genre not notable for its subtlety but the film is insanely complex, full of bizarre psychological conflicts, and murky motivation played out against a narrative framework that seemingly requires every single male character to shoot it out with every other man in the movie. (Since the film has homosexual overtones, the burden of masculinity seems to be having to shoot the other guy to avoid fucking him.) The result is confusing, although like many films noir, the picture is  reasonably lucid on a shot-by-shot basis -- the problem is figuring out, in the end, how the picture progressed from its start to its ending since the the labyrinthine plot is close to impenetrable.

Warlock is Western town of the standard movie variety somehow plopped down in the middle of a vast and barren wasteland of canyons and deserts.  The town seems to have a smelter since we see a little plume of smoke when cowboys crest a hill and see the village posed surrealistically amid an enormous and lethal-looking desert.  (The village which has a Norman Rockwell aspect is just painted into a vista of the canyonlands.)  Like many Western towns of this sort, the economy of the place is never established -- exactly why there would be a town out in this  howling desolation is never explained.  (It's a bit like the town in Westworld although that place has the raison d'etre of imitating villages in old movies like this one).  The only explanation for the place's existence is that the village is a source of rest and relaxation for a group of vicious cowhands who work for an equally vicious rancher on a spread called San Pablo.  The San Pablo ranch is wholly male, with no women-folk around, and this gives the gang of thuggish cowboys an weirdly asexual or, even, homosexual tint.  The cowhands periodically descend upon San Pablo and shoot the place to pieces as shown in an introductory sequence in which a hapless Italian emigrant barber (he's like one of the Mario Bros.) is gunned down and the acting sheriff expelled from town.  The City Fathers, including a beautiful young woman named Miss Jessie, the film's virgin, hire a gunman to act as sheriff and "regulate" the town.  A deputy gets $40 a month; the hired gun is paid $400 for the same time period and says that this is scarcely enough to provide for the ammunition he uses for his incessant fast-gun target practice.  The hired gun is named Blazedale and he is played by Henry Fonda as a more ambiguous version of the sheriff that he acted in Ford's My Darling Clementine -- in one scene, he even leans back in a chair replicating the gesture that characterized the lawman in the Ford film.  This being an "adult" Western, Fonda's Blazedale is given some vestigial psychology and comes equipped with weird sidekick, Morgan, the Black Rattlesnake (played fiercely enough by Anthony Quinn).  Morgan seems modeled on Doc Holiday and he's locked in a homo-erotic love affair with Blazedale -- the  two have been living together for decades and they are, by far, the most compelling romantic couple in the film.  Indeed, when Blazedale falls for the town virgin and begins to court her, poor Morgan melts down and goes berserk, shooting at everyone in town.  This, in turn, drives Blazedale into a frenzy and, after the manner of William S. Hart in Hell's Hinges, he burns down half the town that he is sworn to defend.  Blazedale and Morgan are dudes and they wear resplendent vests with satin backs; Morgan even reads from a book ostentatiously and speaks like Cicero.  The gowns of the two female leads are even more spectacularly beautiful.  Blazedale and Morgan's modus operandi is to set up a saloon themselves, sell booze, and deal Faro (this is Morgan's specialty), thereby, supplementing Blazedale's income as sheriff.  (This is fine with the town's citizenry.)  Morgan, who walks with a bad limp (perhaps, he's a victim of childhood polio something much on the minds of movie audiences in 1959) seems to have had an illustrious career as a pimp, promoting showgirls and prostitutes in their saloon.  One of Morgan's ex-prostitutes, Lily, played by the pouting Dorothy Malone, comes to town with a man who is supposed to kill someone as an act of revenge for the death of her boyfriend, the gunman's brother, some time before.  Morgan, who's relationship to Lily is extremely odd, guns down the avenger when her stagecoach is robbed by members of the San Pablo gang -- thus, pinning the murder on the vicious cowboys from the ranch.  Lily promptly falls for Johnny Gannon, one of the mob of evil cowboys, who is torn by pangs of conscience and leaves the San Pablo gang to become a deputy sheriff working with Blazedale.  Everyone in the movie has an elaborate back-story -- Lily is a whore trying to go straight (who has lost her lover and desires revenge), Johnny Gannon (Richard Widmark) is a post-Korean war vet with PTSD, although the movie is set in 1881 -- he participated in a massacre of Mexicans in a canyon ambush contrived by the San Pablo gang and can't shake his sense of guilt over those killings.  Morgan, renowned as a deadly murderer, is tormented by memories of being taunted and despised for being a cripple.  All of this works itself out through a series of stylized gunfights on the main street of unfortunate Warlock.  After mangling Johnny's hand, the leader of the San Pablo gang attacks the town and his mob gets killed off -- this is where the viewer expects the film to end.  But, then, Johnny Gannon has to fight Blazedale and Blazedale has to fight his best friend (and possible lover) Morgan and so on and on.  Everyone talks in a high-flown literary kind of way, reflecting, perhaps, the fact that the movie is adapted from a well-regarded novel by Oakley Ames (recently reissued by the New York Review of Books press).  The film is shot in overlit cinemascope technicolor -- interiors are all sparkling clean and gleam like high efficiency late-fifties kitchens.  The landscapes, apparently filmed in Southeastern Utah are gorgeous, vast red canyons and towering mesas but almost all of the action takes place on the dusty main street of Warlock, a highly conventional setting.  Dymytryk tries to make things visually interesting -- in the opening sequence, a watering truck is spraying dust on the High Noon-style main street; this results in a two-tone lane, half wet and dark red and the other dusty red for a preliminary shoot-out. (The water-truck also gets perforated in a predictable way.) In a later scene, that could be extracted from Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, the vengeful Blazedale stands as a pale figure of retribution in the charred ruins of his own saloon, a place that he has burned in a fit of irrational pique arising from his lover's quarrel with Morgan.  Toward the end of the movie, everyone is acting from motives that are "deep" in the shallow way of psychoanalytically motivated fifties' films with the result that the action is confusing and seems unrealistically contrived.  The gun battles are reasonably well choreographed, although they make little sense from a practical standpoint -- typically, it's one man against about twenty; why would anyone accept these odds.  Everyone is obsessed with something called "backshooting" -- that is, getting an opponent to face-off with you for a gun duel and, then, having an accomplice shoot the foe in the back.  This is so obsessively adumbrated that one gets the distinct feeling that something else is at stake here -- probably homosexual buggery which may underlie some of the conflicts in this very conflict-ridden movie.  It's all acted well and DeForest Kelley (later famous for Star Trek) has an amusing role as yet another emotionally confused cowboy who switches sides and joins the good guys by the end of the movie.  The film is okay, I guess, but its too complicated and, after a while, you give up on trying to construe the picture so that it makes sense.   

Midnight Special

Midnight Special (Jeff Nichols 2014) shows how conviction and technical proficiency can elevate incoherent pulp into a film that is entertaining and, even, suspenseful and gripping.  The movie's plot is an embarrassment, but the movie is made with great craft and features an astounding cast:  This is a chase movie, fast-paced and packed with alarming incidents, and, if you don't stop to catch your breath and reflect on the proceedings everything seems vaguely plausible.  It's only in retrospect that you realize that the plot doesn't make any sense and really doesn't lead anywhere.

A cult named The Ranch live on big farm somewhere in west-central Texas. (It's like a Mennonite version of David Koresh's Waco cult).  Although this is not immediately clear, the cult members led by a preacher (played well by the late Sam Shepherd) worship a blessed boy.  The boy has magical powers, seems clairvoyant, and emits beams of blinding light from his eyes.  He speaks in tongues as well as all known languages and recites numbers that the cult members faithfully record in scripture -- these numbers, of course, turn out to GPS coordinates.  The boy has announced that some apocalyptic event will take place in four days.  Then, he goes missing -- abducted, for some reason never explained, by his biological father Roy (Michael Shannon looking very gaunt and angry).  Roy's motivations are unclear -- he seems to be transporting the boy to the GPS coordinates assigned for the apocalypse.  The plot is time-worn:  the classic double-chase -- the cult members are hunting for the boy and the authorities to whom his disappearance have been reported have also issued an Amber Alert, that is an APB, for the kid who seems to be about eight.  In fact, the story expands into a triple chase when sinister government agencies join in the pursuit, led, more or less, by an agent named Paul Sevier (Adam Driver).  After various shootouts and calamities, including an attack by a secret government death satellite (it rains down missile or blasts things with death rays), the little boy is reunited with his mother, Roy's estranged wife (Kirsten Dunst).  In the last third of the movie, the boy is apprehended by the government, uses his magical powers to escape by enlisting the help of Servier, and is driven his father and an accomplice, Roy, at high speed to his destiny, an encounter that takes place in the saltwater swamps near Pensacola.  It turns out that the kid is a representative of a higher order of beings who live in a world superimposed on our reality.  He rejoins his kind, beings of light, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after, although nursing various shotgun and bullet wounds.  

The bare recitation of the plot shows that the movie makes no objective sense.  How was this magical being born to mere humans?  Why are the cult members pursuing him?  Why does the boy's father take him to his mother?  Why is the little kid horribly ill and, even, dying in the first two-thirds of the movie and, then, just fine for the climax?  At one point, someone says about people detecting the little boy:  "If he didn't want you  to see him, your wouldn't see him."  Needless to say this begs the question:  why is there a chase with all sorts of gunfights and car crashes?  If the kid has unlimited magical powers, then why doesn't he just exercise them and avoid all of the melodrama -- obviously, he could blind everyone to his presence, manipulate the mind of someone to drive him to the proper coordinates, and, then, simply join his divine kind without all the guns firing and tires squealing.  The last ten minutes which reveals the full extent of the boy's powers shows us that the whole movie is unnecessary -- the omnipotent kid could just achieve his transfiguration in the salt estuaries by invoking his magical powers and no mere mortal would need be involved.  So the picture is a sort of cheat.  Furthermore, it makes no sense even on the most concrete levels -- people get shot at point blank range, but somehow aren't really hurt (I think this has something to do with bullet-proof vests).  The domain of the beings of light (creatures that are bodiless orbs of brilliant radiance) live in a city comprised of what look like ornate freeway overpasses on which trees are growing and vast concrete ramps and chutes and ladders -- exactly what use do bodiless beings of light make of all this brutalist and vacant concrete?  None of this makes any sense at all.

The picture is a mash-up of The Sugarland Express with Kirsten Dunst playing the role of the mother that was performed by Goldie Hawn in Spielberg's first film with elements of Close Encounters of the Third Kind mixed with a half-dozen other supernatural thrillers including aspects of Brian de Palma's The Fury.  The plot is unclear even on the most fundamental level -- all the stuff about speaking in tongues and GPS coordinates never coheres into anything that can be deciphered on a narrative level.  At one point, Paul Sevier announces that he has figured out the GPS code,but never explains what he has concluded -- although he looks grandly satisfied with his own sapience.  But, weirdly enough, this idiotic nonsense is gripping because the acting is excellent -- Kirsten Dunst and Michael Shannon are suitably intense and anguished.  Joel Edgerton playing Lucas, a highway patrol cop who has joined the crusade is effectively conflicted as to the various felonies that he has to commit.  The henchmen of the Ranch pursuing the little kid are convincingly scary.  The special effects, mostly earthquakes that the boy induces when he gets angry and blast of blinding light, are reasonably plausible.  The action sequences are well-choreographed although they make no sense in terms of motivation.  In the first half of the film, for some unknown reason, the boy can only travel at night and he has some kind of illness that makes daylight toxic to him -- this means that the movie's landscape of low-rent motels and empty highways is always filmed in the dark or just before (of after) sunrise.  The kid is cured of his inexplicable photophobia in the second half of the movie and everything is shot in the daylight, but also beautifully filmed.  The minor characters are impeccably cast and Kirsten Dunst makes herself cinvincingly plain with hardened features -- she looks like about half the single mothers in the United States.  Everyone seems menaced, down-at-the-mouth and disheveled.  There are a number of impressive shots, apparently orchestrated with drones -- in one scene, the camera rolling along a rural road in a pine forest suddenly takes flight, lifts up, and climbs above the trees to reveal a vast landscape over which a half-dozen government helicopters are darting here and there like anxious flies -- it's a fine image.  The score, an ominous chase theme, is excellent.  The fundamental problem is that the film is futile -- in the last ten minutes in which the boy can read minds, knows the future, and has the power of a nuclear reactor, it seems that a humane divinity would just spare the mortals all this muss and fuss and ascend into heaven without making such a mess here on earth.  

  

A Hidden Life

These days, when everyone talks about 'resistance', Terrence Malick's A Hidden Life, is timely in a startling manner.  The film is overblown and very long (174 minutes), but its defects are part of the program -- in other words, the film's eccentricities are part of the design, and, I think, built to engender debate.  Indeed, the picture's very grandiosity, which feels suffocating at times, is thematic:  are we seeing a majestic revelation of the Truth or, merely, an exercise is self-aggrandizing pride?  The very questions that dog the film are integral to its meaning.  In this moment, when 'resistance' seems mostly defined by muttering imprecations, at your cable news feed, Malick's film about this subject should be seen by many and discussed.  But the picture is too solemn, it's setting too remote from contemporary affairs, and the movie's vast and humorless ambition coupled with its length will make it inaccessible to most people.  This is unfortunate because Malick's movie has much to tell us about our present political dilemma.

The plot of A Hidden Life can be summarized in a couple of sentences:  An Austrian farmer, married and with three small children, finds himself unable to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler.  He defies the system and it doesn't end well for him.  For the film's first hour, the hero (Franz Jaegerstaetter) agonizes over the loyalty oath.  At the 72 minute mark, he refuses to swear loyalty the the Fuehrer.  About two more hours pass detailing his imprisonment and the hardships that his alleged disloyalty inflict upon his family members, principally, his wife, Fani and his elderly mother -- the three little girls as is the case with children are mostly oblivious to the tragedy around them.  He's executed about ten minutes before the end of the film and there's a short coda exploring the meaning of his life, posited to be "hidden" in that his sacrifice (or martyrdom) was unseen by the world, not marked by anyone but those who lived in the village from which he came, and, seemingly, "unhistoric" -- that is, without historical consequences.  The film is fundamentally philosophical in that it poses certain questions as to the hero's motivation and whether his sacrifice (which also involves sacrificing family members as "collateral damage") is warranted in that it seems to have no practical effect except to increase the quotient of suffering in the world.  As people repeatedly urge, Franz can avoid all this misery by signing a paper that means nothing, by simply maintaining his inner reservations about the regime, and by a tiny modicum of cooperation -- he's told again and again that if will agree to the loyalty oath, he can perform his military service as a nurse or in a hospital, that is, without compromising his pacifist principles.  But Franz maintains that even the slightest cooperation with the Nazi regime is immoral and he will not in any way lend himself to a political system that he despises -- this is notwithstanding the fact that literally everyone else in the film urges him to not be so stiff-necked (that is, prideful) about the situation.  Curiously, Franz' stance resembles the deranged protagonist in the documentary Tread, a man who destroys a whole town with a bulldozer because he refuses to compromise (even though it would be to his own benefit).  There's a whiff of madness and extremism about Franz' quest for martyrdom (something that brings a prosecuting attorney to literally froth at the mouth) -- after the guy destroyed the town with the bulldozer, a tape recording was discovered in which he said:  "And, then, I became unreasonable" -- the motto for the Right wing anarchist Boogaloo boys who are presently trying to foment a race war in this country.  A Hidden Life is about Franz becoming "unreasonable."  

This discussion of the film as an essay in political philosophy neglects the fact that much of the movie is overtly mystical.  In Malick's view, human beings dwell in the cathedral of a deified nature -- we don't need to imagine heaven as a remote paradise:  in fact, we live in terrestrial paradise that all too often we defile.  This notion is dramatized by the film's insistence on the extraordinary physical beauty of its locations:  Franz lives in an idyllic village surrounded by hanging mountain meadows beneath enormous granite peaks.  A mountain that appears in about a quarter of the shots in the movie is a soaring collection of improbable buttresses and pinnacles that looks like a Gothic cathedral.  Central of many shots of the landscape is a onion-dome steeple, the local Catholic parish, filmed against the backdrop of the cathedral mountain.  (The church is central to the film's narrative as well -- as is usually,the case the congregation are adherents to the established order and, if they have an reservations about Hitler, they keep them to themselves.)  The film's pictorial beauty is astonishing -- it's overwhelming on my TV and I can only speculate as to the effects of these landscapes on a big screen.  Enormous rivers course relentlessly through the meadows.  Mills stamp and hammer under the impact of water turning water-wheels.  A huge cascade gushes off the top of an 800 foot escarpment and is visualized in the film as the equivalent of God's majesty descending in a torrent to earth.  Malick's camera glides over verdant wheat fields and poses peasants in picturesque stances in these green and glowing alpine meadows.  In many shots, the director uses a sort of fish-eye lens to cause the landscape to seem to wrap around the central figure in the image -- this effect dramatizes Malick's contention that we are each at the center of our own universes and, therefore, morally responsible for what happens in them.  In the last two hours, the film rhythmically alternates between prison cells in which the hero is suffering, Piranesi-like dungeons full of brick barrel-vaults, iron scaffolding, and long corridors with light only faintly visible at the end of the tunnel and the landscapes of the Austrian Alps with the sun shining in splendor on the green pastures and luminous peaks.  Malick's problem, of course, is that the mountain imagery is too breathtaking and tends to devolve into Hallmark card or Nat Geo prettiness and, so, he often cuts away from the scenery to something more problematic, an aspect of the landscape that is troubling.  A good example is a couplet of shots in the middle of the film -- a couple is shown embracing in a gorgeous meadow in the magic hour of twilight; Malick's editing is generally counter-intuitive -- he cuts when you don't expect an edit, introducing an element of instability into what would otherwise be tediously architectronic compositions.  In this case, he cuts away to another angle on the landscape in which a weird-looking scarecrow seems crucified near where the couple are embracing.  Malick uses jump cuts -- he will suddenly cut from an encounter between characters to a moment apparently several minutes later but using the same camera set-up and figures in the image.  These cuts have a very peculiar resonance in Malick's work that is hard to exactly characterize, but they are essential to his style.  The idea seems to be that the later shot comments in some way on the earlier image, not exactly explaining it but rather extending its meanings -- furthermore, the cut demonstrates that time is discontinuous.  Our sense of time consists of "highlights" or moments that are important to us -- hence, the time-cuts seem to suggest that the imagery is refracted through someone's memory.  We aren't seeing events as they happened but as they are remembered to have happened.   This imparts to the whole film something of the aspect of elegy -- Franz has already died and we are shown the remnants of images in which he is remembered.  The film's ambitions are underscored by compositions by Bach and Beethoven as well as Dvorak, Gorecki, and Arvo Part on the soundtrack.  The enormous tableau are off-set by strange tiny details -- after Franz has been sentenced to death, he is driven back to Tegel prison in Berlin; on the way to the jail, the driver, a fat military officer, stops at a cafe possibly to buy cigarettes.  Franz accompanies the man into the cafe and, when the officer accidentally knocks over someone's umbrella leaning against the door frame, the prisoner reaches down to set it up again.  Out on the sidewalk, the military officer does an odd little Bavarian dance.  When Franz is awaiting execution, the camera cuts away to domestic animals -- a cow in chains that appear to the audience like some kind of  manacles, some geese, a small, patient-looking donkey:  we live in a world, Malick seems to say, in which human suffering is extraordinary, but in which the ubiquitous suffering of animals is mostly invisible, routinely disregarded.  (This idea is driven home by a shot of Franz' wife standing next to the carcass of a large pig that is being bled out into a bucket.)  Farm work is shown as drudgery and, even, has a literally sinister edge -- in many scenes, the peasants wield scythes and everyone seems to have a blade that they periodically caress.  The repeated images of wheat and grass being mowed down by people swinging huge curved blades remind us that human life is like the grass -- we flourish for awhile and are, then, thrown into the furnace.  Biblical correlates, of course, are everywhere:  when Franz is admonished by a troubled judge (played by a miserable and much dilapidated Bruno Ganz), the camera tilts downs to show the old man's weathered hands -- Pilate, of course, washed his own  hands after condemning Jesus to death.  By this stage in the film, Franz's rectitude is no longer in doubt.  The Judge is frightened that Franz is judging him -- the convict is no longer judged but his mere presence judges others.  When the sentence of death is announced in the Reichstribunal courtroom, Franz's lawyer seems about to faint.

Franz's motivations are obscure.  The characters are not developed in any conventional way. Malick introduces Fani's sister into the film and we expect that he has done this so that Franz's wife will have someone to talk with when he is imprisoned and, therefore, off-screen -- the character seems to be a device to allow for dialogue:  after all, people in movies have to have someone with whom to talk.  But there is almost no dialogue between the two women and the sister exists primarily to aid Fani in sequences involving backbreaking agricultural labor.  The sister is less a tool to allow speech and dialogue, then, a figure to be employed in beautifully staged two-shot compositions. And, in fact, the middle hour in the film is essentially silent -- it's mostly music and whispered voices-over. We learn that Franz was a local hoodlum, proud of "fighting with the police."  We see him tooling around on a motorcycle that seems to distress the stolid peasants laboring in their fields.  His father died in World War One in "the mud of the trenches" and he comes to believe, after seeing movie newsreels, that his "nation has become a predator" murdering the weak -- there is some mention of the regime killing "idiots" or the mentally defective but the plight of the Jews remains off-screen.  (At one point, we see someone who may have escaped from a concentration camp bedraggled and half-crazed in the woods.)  Malick uses Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will to show Hitler descending from the crowds into Nuremberg and there a couple of shots of Styrian (Austrian mountain) peasants marching in a parade to bring gifts to Hitler, but the film doesn't show any atrocities or war violence -- Franz' resistance isn't really based on anything that occurs to him and he's not witness to anything bellicose that extends beyond the sort of bluster that a recruit experiences in basic training.  His martyrdom arises from who he is, not what he sees or what he experiences.  At one point, Franz's elderly mother begs for forgiveness, presumably implying that she is somehow to blame for her son's fatal intransigence -- but this theme isn't developed and we don't why this pathetic figure is asking to be forgiven.  The movie suggests that Franz' misspent youth (he had no father at home) ended when he fell in love with Fani, and much of the film consists of quotes from letters that the two exchanged when Franz was in prison.  (The film is based on true events and the prison letters have been published.)  In some sense, Malick implies that Franz's love for Fani inspires his heroism -- but this is perverse, of course, because that heroism separates him from his wife and children and ruins their lives.  (The villages refuse to aid Fani whom they construe as a sort of traitor and she has to plow her field with the help of her sister only; in one scene, when her well goes dry, we see her laboriously digging in the bottom of the well and hauling up the heavy mud in a bucket -- no one will help her and the family runs the risk of starving.)  When Fani and Franz see one another for the last time in the Berlin prison, she says that she will be "with him"up to the end.  As he is being executed, the film cuts away to shots of Franz on his motorcycle, evidence of his freedom that apparently inspired Fani's interest in him, and we see her in his visions as he is taken to the guillotine.  But, even, these episodes are complicated by countervailing or discordant imagery -- the film's mise-en-scene resembles in some ways a fever dream, a delirium in which all manner of imagery is presented, some of it inconsistent with the apparent thrust of the narrative.  While he is awaiting execution, we see a shot of Franz standing outside -- he's on the edge of a lush forest on the right of the screen; plowed fields here "read" as a wasteland, as a barren space, to his left (we scan from right to left and the composition seems to suggest the desolate terror of the execution that is about to occur).  Franz turns around as if hearing someone crying out behind him and he looks over his shoulder with an expression of fear and anxiety.  It's a startling image that suggests elliptically the horror of his plight.  After he is killed, Malick cuts to a plowed field that Fani and her sister are harrowing -- the big harrow, like an instrument of torture, is flung onto the furrows and the two women, like beasts of burden, drag it across the field.  

Several sequences stand out thematically.  In one early scene, Franz, who is tormented by his decision to refuse the loyalty oath, goes to a church where an artist is retouching and restoring Baroque murals.  The artist says that he is painting for the complacent "church-goers who will look up (to his images) and imagine that they would have stood fast with Jesus during his Passion" -- the artist implies, of course, that they would have lacked the moral fortitude.  The artist alleges that art does nothing -- that it merely confirms the self-righteous complacency of those who fantasize that they are heroic when, in fact, they are creatures of comfort and, like most of us, incapable of real sacrifice.  (Is this a message, not so veiled, to those of us watching this movie?)  In the prison yard, there is an atheist with a beard and wild eyes like Rasputin.  He mocks Franz and says that God is indifferent to his sufferings or worse a sadist because he had designed the world to inflict pain on His creatures.  The atheist is later executed with Franz.  The execution scene takes place in a bleak, nondescript sort of warehouse, a place in which each dock is numbered.  (In hell, everything will be numbered and damned will count incessantly.)  The place of execution is a room with black curtains, a bit like a David Lynch set, and vegetation is growing through the roof, extending long yellowish tendrils into the building.  The guillotine is like a farm implement set on concrete splashed with sinister puddles of water.  The condemned are given sheets of paper on which to write their last remarks -- a boy who is about to be killed says "I don't know what to write."  After Franz is killed, the film cuts away to a wedding in a rural church and, then, a mysterious scene of an old man helping a little girl drink water from an ancient stone fountain in a drizzly rain storm.  The mountains persist forever and we see them in the end, ambiguous fortified heights,both beautiful and forbiddeng.  In a voice-over, Fani says that she will meet Franz again in the mountains and that the orchards will be planted and the farmland restored -- the only heaven we can imagine is the world in which we live.  

A couple of shots in the end establish, very obliquely, the film's theme.  As Franz is taken away to be executed, a guard who beat him savagely in an earlier scene looks momentarily shaken and removes his hat -- no doubt, he will go back to bullying and torturing but for a moment he has seen something that troubles him.  When the bell tolls for Franz in his village, the peasants working in the fields pause and look up into the sky for a moment.  Malick makes his point explicit with a quote from George Eliot.  Eliot's words say that our plight, dreadful, perhaps, as it is, is not as bad as it could have been because of those who led "faithful hidden lives" and now "rest in unvisited graves."  The movie bears witness to such a life.  Much of this film is silly and the landscapes overwhelm the people, but this picture must be seen and debated.  It's a work of great moral seriousness.  Moral gravity can run the risk of seeming foolish, particularly in our debased times -- but the issues that the film raises are persistent, grave, and worth of thought.  

  

Plein Soleil (Purple Noon)

 Plein Soleil (Purple Noon as released in the English-speaking world) is a 1960 psychological crime thriller directed by Rene Clements.  The film is based on a celebrated 1955 novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, the story later adapted for the screen under that title by Anthony Minghella in  1999.  The French film stars Alain Delon as Tom Ripley, the movie's protagonist.  The film is inconsequential, mildly entertaining with a couple of impressive, if repellent, sequences involving disposal of inconvenient corpses.  Since current audiences know the film's premise (from Minghella's film and the Wim Wenders' movie, The American Friend, an adaptation of another Ripley novel, Ripley's Game, there's nothing novel about the picture:  Clements puts the film through its paces, showcases Italy's seas and scenery (also a feature of Minghella's picture) and brings everything to an unsatisfying ambiguous ending -- except as a study in sociopathy there's nothing much to see here and we have been become jaded, I'm afraid, accustomed to much more lurid villainy than the rather sedate and elegant nastiness that appears in Purple Noon.

Tom Ripley, a handsome young man of ambiguous sexual orientation, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy playboy who is jet-setting about the picturesque environs.  The playboy, a nasty piece of work, is named Philip Greenleaf and he is the scion of a San Francisco ship-building family (hence, the nautical aspects of the story).  Greenleaf knew Ripley from childhood, but, apparently, despises him to some degree because of his declasse origins.  In Rome, Ripley and Greenleaf party, paw ingenues, and, generally, behave like privileged swine (they buy a blind man's cane and Greenleaf pretends to be blind to pick up girls).  Greenleaf is engaged to an art historian, also a wealthy girl, who is writing a book on Fra Angelico.  With Ripley and Marge (the art historian), Greenleaf sets sail for Taormina.  Ripley, who has been trying on Greenleaf's clothing and practicing forging his signature, creates a scene with Marge by displaying an earring that the playboy seized from the ingenue in Rome that he was mauling.  Marge gets put ashore after the vicious Greenleaf throws her manuscript about Fra Angelico into the sea.  Greenleaf persists in taunting Ripley who becomes enraged and, on an impulse, kills the playboy.  This sets up the first impressive suspense sequence in which Ripley tries to dispose of the corpse in a gale that threatens to swamp the sailing boat.  Back on shore, Ripley assumes Greenleaf's identity, uses the dead man's letter of  credit, to withdraw thousands of dollars from a Roman bank, and assures Marge that her fiancee is knocking about somewhere in Italy.  There is an obvious sexual attraction that Marge feels toward the handsome Tom Ripley.  A loathsome buddy of Greenleaf appears, figures out that Tom has killed the playboy, but ends up dead at Ripley's hands as well.  This leads to a second suspense sequence in which Ripley manhandles the dead man down several flights of stairs at his hotel in Rome and, then, secretes the corpse in a sarcophagus in the campagna.  The police are now investigating Greenleaf's disappearance as well as the death of Greenleaf's noxious friend, Freddie.  Ripley retreats to southern Italy and seduces Marge.  He plans to sell the sailing boat but when it is hauled ashore, it's discovered that the body of Greenleaf is still shackled to the vessel by tangled anchor cables.  Presumably, Ripley is apprehended, although the ending is ambiguous.

There's nothing special about the film and it's less compelling than later iterations of the plot by Minghella among others.  Alain Delon is impressive as Ripley and manages to induce audience sympathy with the amoral murderer.  The film makes us complicit in Ripley's crimes.  We feel suspense with him when the police are closing in or when he has to dispose of a corpse.  But the story isn't all that interesting.  The Italian locations are pretty and the glimpse of tourism among the privilegedin the last half of the fifties is interesting.  There's no sense that Delon, a very photogenic Frenchman, is actually supposed to be an American and so this aspect of the plot doesn't seem well developed.  I don't think the film is better than the Minghella version and, so, if the subject interests you, watch that film or the brilliant Wender's American Friend (in which Ripley is played by Dennis Hopper in a big cowboy hat.)  

The Vow (HBO) and Tread (Netflix)

In the last two decades, documentaries have detoured dramatically away from didactic or public-spirited works that once dominated the form.  In the past, most documentaries celebrated human accomplishment (for instance, The Plow that Broke the Plains) or showed history-in-the-making (war newsreels like The Battle of San Pietro or The Spanish Earth); even the renegade surrealist Luis Bunuel’s documentary Land without Bread had a social conscience.  Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness portrayed the plight of the blind-deaf; Errol Morris’ documentaries solved crimes and righted injustices.  But many documentaries now popular on Netflix or HBO are, simply put, freak-shows.  These films feature eccentric people involved in grotesque forms of misconduct – the audience marvels at two things: the incredible events shown on screen and the fact that the protagonists of these films were so massively narcissistic as to allow themselves to be filmed committing all manner of crimes and misdemeanors.  It’s hard to ascribe any redeeming social value to The Tiger King (a homosexual exotic animal fetishist) or Wild Wild West (members of a sex cult) or Don’t F**k with Cats (internet-obsessed serial killers).  Documentary as freak-show was probably pioneered by the Maysles’ brothers Grey Gardens, an account of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mentally ill aunt (with daughter) living in awe-inspiring squalor in a crumbling mansion on Long Island.  The bearded lady in her vest of tattoos will always enthrall more people than the the 4H home economics exhibits with their mason-jars of pickles and lingonberry jam.  Two recent exemplars of the freak-show sensibility in modern documentary are The Vow, currently on HBO, and Tread, a documentary on Netflix.

The Vow (2020) traffics in that most problematic of human emotions, Schadenfreude.  There is a distinct, if questionable, pleasure that we feel in observing the self-inflicted travails of those that seem to be better than us.  In The Vow, a cadre of self-absorbed Hollywood types fall under the spell of a tyrannical guru, Keith Raniere.  The guru’s acolytes are a noisome group of minor-league actors and actresses, pretty people with good educations who have suddenly realized what, sooner or later, all of us discover to our dismay – notwithstanding our merit, the world isn’t set up as a playground for our desires nor as a garden delivering perpetual delight.  To be alive is to be disappointed: no doubt Julie Andrews and Raquel Welch (to name two actresses iconic to my generation) suffered dark nights of the soul in which they questioned their beauty and value.  Everyone can name prominent celebrities who upon reaching the very pinnacle of their achievement, then, promptly committed suicide: Anthony Bourdain and Philip Seymour Hoffman come to mind.  The fact is that the world isn’t constituted to reliably deliver happiness although reality can always be counted on to inflict suffering.  When the bright and beautiful discover this, inevitably, a sense of malaise sets in – why am I, despite my intelligence and beauty, not exempt from suffering?  And, this malaise offers an opportunity for a con-man man like Raniere.  KR, as I will call him, devised a set of banal platitudes that he actually patented as an algorithm for artificial intelligence.  These platitudes are simple-minded, the sort of pablum that first-grade teachers administer to their students to enhance their self-esteem.  (The people in The Vow are notably well-endowed with self-esteem.)  Gathering a group of disciples, KR set up a pyramid scheme requiring his followers to enlist more and more adherents to his cult.  On the face of things, there was nothing extreme about KR’s beliefs, which were, as I have noted, a compound of cliches and truisms of the most simple-minded and obvious sort, not dramatically different from the stuff promoted by Norman Vincent Peale.  In fact, the whole enterprise had a noxious aura of self-satisfied well-being and good mental hygiene – ideology promoting a sound mind in a sound body.  (The Pollyanna-ish members of the group played volley-ball as a community exercise.)  In The Vow, our access to this cult is a glib filmmaker of Afrikaaner origin, a tall handsome doofus named Mark – this fellow has produced a well-reviewed film essay with the charming title What the F**k do we know?  Mark is spectacularly narcissistic and a dolt but he’s charming, a bit like a successful used car salesman.  He marries one of the guru’s female associates and rises to a high level in the organization – as you acquire merit you are awarded little scarves to show your rank in the cult.  Mark becomes KR’s best friend and spends innumerable hours walking with the squat, somewhat toad-like cult leader – on the phone, the two chirp to one another using pet names: “Markus” and “Keithus”.  Mark is convinced that he is in the presence of a latter-day Jesus Christ and so tape-records everything that transpires – this proves to be a great benefit to the filmmakers who would later exploit these recordings.  (Needless to say the very pretty people in the cult weren’t camera-shy and there is lots of footage of them cavorting in wholesome ways; on the other hand, the level of treachery implicit in tape-recording every personal conversation is pretty breathtaking.)  Of course, there’s a dark-side that is the subject of a portentous “reveal” – or series of “reveals” since the subject matter of the film is very thin (it would make a good 15 minute Sixty Minutes episode) but has to be stretched to nne hours.  It turns out that the upper echelons of the cult involve some kind of a sex ring in which female subjects willingly submit to be branded in the groin with the initials of the guru KW.  This stuff is undoubtedly amusing and even hilariously funny when the female subject, the doc’s heroine as it were, tries to justify to the camera why exactly it was that she allowed herself (voluntarily) of course to be disfigured by a cauterizing instrument – she’s married and says to one of her female friends: “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to get X– (her husband) to go down there, when I’ve got Keith’s initials branded next to my vagina.”  This is possibly something she should have thought through before agreeing to be branded.  The show lags and is repetitive because profound stupidity isn’t interesting in its own right and the documentary’s characters can only prostrate themselves so many times before the loathsome little guru before the film gets tedious.  As is always the case, there’s not enough footage to go around, particularly to underlie the shocking and serious aspects of the documentary (the branding and sex-cult scenes) and so the filmmakers have to just roll the tapes and amuse us with blurred lights rotating on screen like a sort of demented and out-of-focus color wheel – it’s not a good solution, but the admissions on the tape are so jaw-dropping that you’re willing to excuse the rather slovenly film-making.  (Shoah or The Fog of War this is not.)

The appeal of the show is entirely Schadenfreude.  First, the movie gives us license to view beautiful women and handsome men, all of them prosperous and educated at first-rate and expensive schools, making utter fools of themselves.  These are accomplished folks whom we might ordinarily admire but the movie exposes them to ridicule – indeed, ridicule of the most toxic sort: we laugh at these people because they aren’t aware that they are ridiculous.  The more they try to justify branding one another. sex-trafficking and their other lapses into utter folly and crime, the funnier they are.  Second, we enjoy the inevitable demise of the guru – the vicious little con-man is going to end up in prison (we know this from media reports) and so we will delight in seeing his comeuppance.  These aren’t particularly meritorious emotions and The Vow is a sort of guilty pleasure.  The most astonishing aspect of the film is the universally accepted notion that human beings exist to be happy.  Why would we think this to be true?  The evidence is all to the contrary.  And I note that there are no single mothers attending Community College in the cult and, certainly, no minorities –no Black and Brown people as we have been taught to consider them.  I would guess that these groups of people would be under no false illusions about whether life is supposed to deliver happiness.  The only thing that life predictably delivers is suffering and the only practical wisdom in the world is learning to survive with this truth.

The pathetic thing about the dupes in The Vow is that the secret truths revealed to them by KR are completely devoid of any substance.  KR’s theories lack the wild extravagance of Scientology or, even, the doctrines of the Latter Day Saints.  In fact, his teachings seems primarily derived from motivational lectures delivered by Amway salesmen.  Many years ago, I received as a visitor a close friend from college.  This man was exceptionally handsome and accomplished, the son of a prominent Twin Cities orthopedic surgeon.  He had the best car, the best drugs, the finest and most loving family and friends.  Once, he stole my girlfriend: she didn’t think much of me, but fell so deeply in love with this beautiful fellow that her unrequited passion (when he later abandoned her) caused her to join the Peace Corps and depart the country.  (She told me that she waited in suspense at the jet gate at the airport, hoping against hope, that he would come to rescue her at the last moment.)  Not only was this fellow tall and handsome and athletic, he was also a genuinely nice man and talented, he knew hundreds of folk songs and could sing for hours around campfires while he accompanied himself on the guitar.  When the man came to see me, a few years after college, he asked that I draw a circle representing my wishes and dreams – then, he had me draw a circle representing my capacity to achieve those desires.  “The objective is to make the circle of your capabilities equal the circle of your dreams,” he told me.  And, then, he commenced evangelical efforts on behalf of Amway, a pyramid scheme that, in those days, peddled laundry soap.  I must say that for a moment, I almost forgave his erotic interlude with my girlfriend...almost, but not completely.

There are nine episodes of The Vow and this account is based on watching only three of them – all very repetitive and crammed with irritating self-aggrandizing interviews.  I’m not sure that the dubious appeal of the show will warrant another six hours with it – but once I started watching a program, I generally stick it out to the end.  Raniere is awaiting sentencing in October 2020 on five felony convictions.  Wikipedia tells me that, as I surmised above, Raniere derived most of his gimcrack “philosophy” from involvement with Amway prior to founding his own cult.

    

The appeal of Tread (Paul Solnet, 2019) is more straightforward and less queasily problematic.  Tread is the story of a brilliantly articulate malcontent who spends a year manufacturing a metal-clad behemoth of a bulldozer and, then, uses the machine to demolish most of a small town in scenic Colorado.  Like the protagonists in The Vow, the hero (if you can call him that) is fantastically loquacious and has recorded the memoirs of his conflicts with the residents of the town on a casette-tape.  (I’m probably not spoiling the show too much for you to advise that the hero isn’t going to be around to assist the documentary filmmakers in making the picture.)  In this picture, there’s no fancy color-wheel blur – the camera just shows a giant close-up of the casette, gears spinning like the wheels of doom. This guy, a typical small-town know-it-all, is named Marvin Heemeyer.  He’s an accomplished welder and a hard-driving businessman, a self-made man who migrates to Granby, Colorado after achieving success in the muffler business in Denver and Boulder.  Heemeyer is something of a thrill-seeker and spends all of his leisure time, before acquiring the maniacal obsession that destroys him, plowing tracks in the high-country powder snow on his Polaris.  He’s an attractive man and ends up in bed with the town’s most attractive divorcee – she speaks with a slight, and intriguing, Australian accent.  Everything is going great for Marv until he has a run-in with the City Council, a group of well-meaning morons that control Granby.  (Marv construes the City Councilmen as a vicious and sinister cabal of villains plotting against him; he calls one of them a “barbarian” – although these men are a little smug, there’s no objective evidence that they would be smart enough to successfully conspire against a ham sandwich.)  Marv feels that the City has wronged him through its “good ole boy” network and one night, while lounging around in his hot tub and drinking a beer, God comes to Heemyer and tells him to take revenge on the evil Sodom and Gomorrah that is Granby.  (The film has one of the strangest but most apt epitaphs ever stated: “He was a loner who spent too much time alone in his hot tub.”) Biblical correlates accumulate – like Noah, Marv spends an entire season welding together a massive armature on his big Komatsu bulldozer; this will be the vehicle of his salvation.  Working in a shed in the middle of town, Marv equips the bulldozer, now a veritable Killdozer to cite Theodore Sturgeon’s unrelated short story, with high-caliber machine guns and Tv cameras, complete with compressed air jets, to keep the lenses clean as the tank-like vehicle smashes through half the commercial buildings in town.

Heinrich von Kleist’s famous novel, Michael Kohlhass, involves a law-abiding citizen who is driven into homicidal fury when someone cheats him in a horse-trade.  Kohlhass ends up burning Brandenburg, raising an group rebels that defeats several armies, and has to be talked into surrendering by no less than Martin Luther.  Kleist says that Kohlhass “was the most righteous and, therefore, the most terrible man of his time.”  Heemyer replicates Kohlhass on a more modest scale.  He is enraged because a neighbor acquires a tract of land that he desires.  This leads to a series of squabbles with the City Council over zoning and a sewer access line.  When the City Council rejects Heemeyer’s increasingly unreasonable demands, he hires a lawyer and sues.  Inevitably, he loses the lawsuit, blaming his lawyer for treason.  His attractive girlfriend, probably concerned about his obsessions, abandons him.  When his father dies, Heemyer begins interpreting the signs around him and these portents all lead him to one conclusion: he must wreak vengeance on Granby.  The final orgy of destruction, more or less, lives up to its advance build-up – at the outset of the film, a panicked cop calls for the National Guard.  The fortified Komatsu bulldozer smashes down a half-dozen buildings while the local cops and sheriff’s deputies futilely blast away at it with the shotguns, SWAT sniper rifles, and pistols.  There’s plenty of footage of Heemeyer’s spree and it’s impressive.  The bulldozer rolls over parked cars, pushes aside earthmovers and county bulldozers without breaking a sweat, and, then, plows down entire buildings reducing them to rubble.  Needless to say, this doesn’t end well although for a few hours, it seems, that Heemeyer and his revenge reign invincible over Granby.  

The film is effectively designed, a combination of reenactments (shot in semi-darkness to disguise the fact that the reenactors don’t look much like the principals in real life) and actual newsreel footage of the bulldozer destroying the town.  Heemeyer in the cockpit of his tank in the reenactments is filmed from behind, a silhouette brooding over the controls with flickering TV screens guiding him on his rampage.  The City Council is shot as a group of small-town boosters with unctuous and sinister smiles on their face.  Some talking heads, many of them still devoted to Marv, put in their two-cents worth, and there are some nice drone shots of Granby and the very pretty Colorado countryside.  The director has a couple of tricks up his sleeve – because of a paucity of footage, he uses the same shot over and over again, an image of Marv, with an avuncular grin, gazing into the camera.  It’s an image of nice guy, a hail fellow well-met, but when the camera suddenly pans down, late in the film, we see that Marv has a big, bazooka-sized rifle at this feet.  An image of an old Nazi publication, Angaben zum  Fuehrer (“Particulars as to the Fuehrer”) is shown several times, but without any explanation as to what this image is doing in the film.  (The suggestion is that Heemeyer is some kind of neo-Nazi, but this is never shown in the movie.)  History is written by the winners and most of the commentary in the film is provided by Marv’s sworn enemies, indeed the men who had their businesses trashed by his ‘dozer.  The film is refreshing in that its doesn’t draw a moral and makes no effort to explain what motivated Heemeyer to construe a series of minor disputes as a pattern of vicious conspiracy such that it required him to destroy a whole town.  I have often counseled people that men and women can endure the most terrible calamities – the death of children, horrible diseases – with equanimity.  But no one can abide an injustice, real or perceived.  And, so, we are left with the dispiriting observation that Kleist made about Michael Kohlhaas, like Heemeyer an actual historical figure: he was “both righteous and terrible.”

(Heemeyer’s rampage inspired an excellent Russian film, Leviathan (2014) directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev  The internet tells me that after Heemeyer lowered the shield over the top of the bulldozer, he was effectively trapped inside.  In other words, the mission was suicidal from the outset.  Heemeyer’s rant recorded on cassette contains some phrasing that has influenced far-Right terrorists.  The so-called Boogaloo boys have adapted as a motto Heemeyer’s statement: “Then, I become unreasonable.”)

 

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

 Spoilers:  there is no meaningful way to write about Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Netflix Original) without revealing the film's morose conclusion and its occult structure.  The attentive viewer will readily grasp that the film is not set in the real world but a domain of fantasy and remembrance within the first ten minutes.  Accordingly, telling you how the film ends and explaining some of its structure shouldn't be too damaging to the reader's enjoyment of the movie.  (In fact, the movie isn't made to be "enjoyable" in the conventional sense and so there's probably no harm in disclosing its secrets.  But each reader will need to make his or her decision as to whether to proceed.)

I'm Thinking about Ending Things is probably the most elaborate move ever made about the death of a school janitor in the Midwest.  Kaufman combines two antithetical ideas in the film.  People are fundamentally inauthentic and contrive their lives from things that other people have said as well as quotations from books, poets, and films that they  have seen.  We live in a blizzard of cultural references that we don't control; rather, they inhabit us and guide our actions.  Second, life is a macabre journey in which we are the playthings of time -- time blows through us like a gale and everyone exists in a transient world of appearances that fade away as we age and die.  Time makes life a tissue of regrets and sorrow -- what we love passes away.  The two themes are probably related on some religious level:  there is a Buddhist sense that no one  really exists authentically and that all pleasures (and pains) experienced by this inauthentic being are, in effect, illusory.  (Certain aspects of Christian mysticism and modern existentialism may also be in play -- Heidegger says that human beings lead lives that are inauthentic and that the essence of living is a relationship with time and death --the gale that sweeps through us.  The fundamental problem with these concepts, which Kaufman navigates skillfully, is that, if we are mere puppets trapped in a web of lies that we tell to one another and ourselves, then, why should anyone care about our sorrows and joys?  There is no real entity that suffers. No one is home in the haunted house whispering quotations to us.

These premises are dramatized by a dream-like road trip taken by a young man named Jake (Jesse Plemons) and his girlfriend whose name is never exactly established -- it may be Lucy, Lucia, or, even, Louise.  The film begins with the woman's monologue in which she says that "(she) is thinking of ending things."  Of course, this phrase suggests suicide, but, soon, enough we are relieved to discover that she is probably alluding to ending her relationship with Jake.  She and Jake drive through a snowy landscape that becomes, as he says, increasingly "farmy".  They are traveling to visit this parents.  There are several immediate clues that the surface narration is deceptive.  Jake picks up the woman on a street in the "big city" -- but the street doesn't look urban:  it's more like Main Street in a rural town in the Midwest.  Second, Jake seems to sometimes know what the girl is thinking and can complete her sentences and, even, unspoken musings.  Although the young woman is our access to the film and represents the movie's perspective (and consciousness) we don't learn too much about her -- and what we do learn is unclear:  she is either a medical student of some kind or an artist or taking a film course that requires that she write an essay on John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence.  (At one point, we're told that she studying quantum physics, but, then, these studies seem to be attributed to Jake.)  We don't know anything about her life before she met Jake, either when she was out with her girlfriend at a bar where there was a trivia contest or a "meet cute" at a restaurant called The Red Line Cafe (where she serves hamburgers but is revealed to be a Vegan.  (The Red Line Cafe biography is extracted from a movie that Jake is seen to be watching directed ostensibly by Robert Zemeckis.)  After an increasingly eerie trip through an empty and desolate frozen countryside, the couple reach Jake's parents' place, an isolated farmhouse in the heart of the heart of the country.  The encounter at the home is filmed like an extended sequence from a horror film -- there are gothic touches involving a story about a pig devoured alive by maggots, a locked door to the basement marred by nasty-looking scratches in the wood, and strange sealed rooms.  Jake's parents beckon from an upstairs bedroom but, then, don't come down for a long time.  When they appear, Jake's mother is strangely animated -- Jake has told the young woman that she is unwell and, possibly, dying but, at first, she seems vehemently alive -- and his father (played by David Thewlis) seems somehow deranged:  his British accent seems oddly out of place and he makes strange jokes that seem somehow aggressively sarcastic. As the meal in the  house progresses (it's farm-raised pork, of course) time slips out of joint.  Jake's parents leave the room 50 years old and return in their eighties.  His father, now, is senile and makes inappropriate sexually suggestive remarks to the girl.  Jake seems to be attending to his elderly mother, feeding her soup, as she dies.  At one point, the girl has said that she is an artist and shows pictures of her landscape paintings to Jake's father who acts obtuse about them -- "How can a landscape be sad without someone who is sad in it?" he asks.  When the girl goes into Jake's boyhood room, she sees a big volume of Wordsworth and a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael.  Someone forces the young woman to go into the haunted basement.  There, she finds a washing machine full of sudsy janitor uniforms and a little room filled with paintings -- but these are mysteriously the paintings that she has shown to Jake's father on her cell-phone, that is, her paintings but all signed "Jake."  The blizzard is now in full spate.  The couple leave the home and drive to a soft-serve ice-cream place called Tulsy Town (obviously a Dairy Queen) -- there they order milk shakes called Brrr! (again, the Dairy Queen Blizzard).  Some pretty girls make fun of Jake who they claim to know from High School.  Jake is now becoming increasingly agitated and menacing -- he starts to look more than a little like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.  Obsessed with finding a dumpster to throw away the uneaten milk shakes, Jake drives through the terrifying storm to a huge silent high school -- it looks like The Overlook Hotel in The Shining.  When he tries to make out with the young woman, Jake says that someone is spying on them and vanishes into the storm.  The girl follows him into the High School where a beautiful young couple are performing in the hallways the ballet from Oklahoma.  (Jake has said that he acted in Oklahoma in High School, knows all about musical theater, and can sing songs from the Rodgers and Hammerstein score to the famous musical.)  

By this point, the alert viewer will have deduced that the reason we know nothing about the young woman's background is because, notwithstanding the cunningly misleading voice-overs, she doesn't really exist.  The entire film is taking place as an increasingly delirious fantasy, apparently imagined by the janitor in the ghostly deserted high school.  The Janitor is Jake as an old man -- this fact explains the weird scramble of periods that the film shows:  the decor looks like the fifties or early sixties, but people have cell-phones and discuss reasonably current events.  Apparently, Jake broke up with the girl (or she abandoned him) and, ultimately, returned to the home place to care for his aging parents.  They have now died and he is working as the night janitor at the high school.  But he has decided to "end things" -- in this case, not a relationship but his life.  The janitor goes out into the storm, sits in his pickup and takes off his janitor uniform (we have seen this in the washer at the parents' farmhouse.)  It's a "paradoxical reaction" to hypothermia, feeling intense heat and stripping off his clothes.  The dying man has several visions:  he is led back into the school by the pig that the maggots have been eating alive.  In the school, he is awarded the Nobel Prize for physics -- this takes place in the High School auditorium.  Jake's lost girlfriend rises to applaud when he is given the prize. Snow covers the pickup and the janitor, presumably, dies.  Thus, the whole film is revealed to be the dying fantasies of the school janitor, apparently, Jake as an old man.  

Kaufman's point seems to be that Jake was never real to begin with and the girl, therefore, is doubly unreal -- although we have been tricked by the voice-over (which is presumably also Jake's fantasy) that the young woman is, in fact, the film's center-of-consciousness.  In fact, Jake can complete her sentences and knows her thoughts because she doesn't exist outside of his increasingly feeble memories  -- although the young woman may be based on a lost girlfriend, for the purpose of the film she's just a figment of the dying janitor's imagination.  (This is why the girl's paintings, for instance, are pictures that Jake, in fact, made; the girl is a "woman under the influence" -- that is, wholly imagined -- in the blizzard, she quotes Pauline Kael, at length, from a famous review of the Cassavetes' movie but this is just something that Jake once read that he now recalls as he freezes to death.  Kaufman is playing a metafictional game -- Jake imagines an adventure with the girl, but Jake isn't real:  he's just a collage of quotations from Wordsworth, Pauline Kael, and Goethe (among others) -- in other words, Jake isn't real because he's made up by Charlie Kaufman, someone who has read the poet, the film critic, and the author of Faust.  The entire film is compounded from quotations -- there are elements from Strindberg's A Dream Play and Kaufman reprises the surreal memories of the old professor in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, particularly in the scene in which the old Jake imagines that he has received the Nobel Prize for physics.  (He wears the medal around his neck like the old man in the Bergman film).  The picture also cites various horror movies, most notably The Shining.  (Jake's mother is played by the actress who appeared in Hereditary, the celebrated recent horror film, and the family home has some of noisome atmosphere of the house in that movie.)  Everyone wants to imagine that they are the hero of a musical, specifically, the handsome   from Oklahoma, but we have misremembered our role in that show -- we weren't the hero, Curly McLain but instead the hired man Jud Fry who tries to rape the heroine and ends up dead. (Of course, the burly rough-hewn Jesse Plemons who plays Jake would be cast as the villain in Oklahoma.) Poor Jud is dead.  Poor Jake is dead, frozen to death.  Kaufman's film is impressive but almost too sad to bear.  

Fragments (Anthology film)

 A woman wearing a kind of wire brassiere and panties glares through hooded eyes at the camera.  She wriggles her pale flesh.  An old man with a grizzled beard looks down on a youth playing a violin.  On a snowy street, the youth hands the old man a coin.  The old man walks off in a blizzard doubled by the whirling flecks and vortices of the decomposition in the ancient nitrite film.  A fire blazes against a wall, pouring smoke onto a toddler who darts back and forth in terror.  A woman breaks free of those restraining her in a dense crowd of onlookers.  She climbs a stairway, lunging through the flames to reach the infant crouching under clouds of smoke.  The woman takes the baby in her arms and, after much hesitation, hurls herself from a third story window, landing on a round canvas stretcher with a sort of bulls-eye on it.  Then, the front of the brick building falls into the street.  All of this is barely glimpsed through a pelting hail of white specks and dervish-like decay on the film.  A woman flaunts her shockingly red  hair.  Half-naked people shown in silhouette against the full moon dive into a swimming pool.  A preacher feigns the ability to heal the sick.  A man lying prostrate at the preacher's feet, shakes with spasms but slowly rises, proclaiming that the pastor has healed him.  Ten yards away a little boy on crutches, inspired by the healing drops his crutches on the path and lunges forward toward the faith healer, staggering but not falling.  The faith healer's face is contorted with repulsion and horror.  A beautiful boy wearing a turban makes a yearning gesture toward the camera. 

These are some of the fragments of silent films otherwise lost that are preserved in a compilation called Fragments, a 2011 anthology containing film restored through various archival auspices.  Many of the individual film clips are of limited interest -- but they have a melancholy aspect in that they represent movies that are now thought to be otherwise lost.  The film's hosts, two stiff fellows who look at the camera with ill-concealed hostility, introduce the snippets of film, shown in nine groups of three each.  The retrieved footage varies in length from about 8 or 9 seconds -- images of Roman Novarro in a turban -- to an entire reel of film from a picture that was probably released as a feature in 10 to 12 reels (that is, about ten minutes of screen time).  Some of the stuff is astonishing, but lacking context, the footage seems a bit forlorn and, even, freakish.  Clearly, film restoration is a matter for fetishists -- to the fetishist, all film is created equal and equally deserving of restoration.  Unfortunately, audiences might not share this belief and some of this material, much of it degraded to almost complete illegibility, is too fragmentary to get much traction with the viewer.  This is the sort of film that might haunt you in dreams but doesn't have much effect on your conscious mind.  (The segments identified above are a. Theda Bara as Cleopatra -- about a minute of extant footage; b. Emil Jannings in The Way of all Flesh, an Oscar winning performance visible in remaining footage of about six minutes (and vandalized by a gloating narrative added to an earlier anthology film released in the fifties); c. Baby Peggy, a child star (four when the picture was made) in a lost melodrama -- the spectacular fire scene is about five or six minutes long but very badly damaged; d. an early technicolor screen test showing Clara Bow, the "It" girl; e. a fragment of a lost Clara Bow feature; f. Lon Chaney as a man pretending to be spastic and, then, healed in The Miracle Man (1919); g. Roman Novarro in a clip from a lost film.)  The Roman Novarro clip signifies in a way what is wrong with this anthology.  Novarro is a figure well-known from other films that have survived, including both Ben Hur and a complete picture from 1930 in which he sings.  We know what Novarro looks like and have some sense of his physical habitus -- therefore, what's the point of showing eight seconds of him from a lost film, probably of dubious merit and, certainly, not remarkable in the tiny fragment here screened.

Several of the extended sequences in the film are interesting.  In a 1918 picture starring Douglas Fairbanks, the hero (who looks like a member of the local Kiwanis) climbs all over some buildings -- he's supposed to be chasing a parrot that has escaped from him.  The film poses the question as to who is really in the cage:  the parrot or Fairbanks who works as a bank teller (that is, in a cage).  A comedy two-reeler shows a frenetic breakneck race between several chariot-like rigs -- they crash into trees or roll off cliffs and the stunts are hair-raising.  In an early musical, an enormous chorus of dancing girls trots around in a huge set featuring expressionistic, canted skyscrapers.  There's some kind of plot involving a chorus-girl trying to seduce a wealthy man, but the lines are delivered in a stilted fashion as if the actress were reading them phonetically.  Someone strums a guitar and sings "Tiptoe through the Tulips" in a high-voice, not exactly a falsetto, but crooning.  Dancers appear and they hop around directly in front of the performer, a disconcertingly poor way of "blocking" the scene.  Later, men in black suits appear and perform astonishing gymnastic effects while dancing -- they throw one another around the stage with abandon and turn back- and front-flips but it's all vaguely abstract because the camera doesn't move, set in an imagined balcony looking down on a proscenium stage where all of this havoc is occurring, the army of girls hoofing it on the enormous stage -- it must be eighty feet high -- while the lead actress cavorts in the center of all the action, but behind a scrim of specialty vaudeville acrobats hurling themselves around wildly,  The longest and most interesting sequence is a hysterically overwrought John Ford melodrama, the last reel of something called The Village Blacksmith, a feature film from 1922,  In a terrifying tempest, two men are scheming -- they are villains and their faces are contorted into Kabuki masks of overt evil.  Two other men, both of them bedridden, cry out that something must be done.  Then, one of the men throws himself to the ground and writhing like a worm wriggles out into the pelting fury of the storm.  The man crawling in the mud like a worm invades the sanctum where the two villains are plotting.  One of them seizes a bullwhip and begins to savagely lash the paralyzed man on the floor.  Then, a brute of man appears on the scene, smites the vicious fellow wielding the whip (the poor fellow on the floor seems to be dead).  He drags both of the evil men with the Kabuki demon faces to a church where a crowd of people are waiting.  There's  a sort of debate.  The two evil characters have themselves been dragged through the mud and they are covered in black ooze.  Cut to a wedding.  A man is lurking near the wedding.  When a well-dressed man appears in the frame, the lurking man seizes him and seems to steal his suit and trousers and tie.  Then, the lurking man, suitably appareled, arrives at the wedding.  Everyone seems happy.  The End.  (I have no idea what this sequence of events is supposed to mean but it is all vividly shot and edited with exaggerated actions, big gestures, and wild scene-setting -- the storm is shot as a number of soaking wet faces suddenly appearing out of the darkness to pull apart veils of branches or flapping leaves; they seem to be desperately searching for something.  Now and then, these images are intercut with inserts of lightning and pictures of the wind knocking things down.)  In a tiny fragment of technicolor sound film, Laurel and Hardy are also caught in a violent tempest.  An mean-looking old bear ambles into a cave. The boys find that their tent has blown over and so they retire to the cave to sleep -- Olly:  Stan, where did you get that fur coat?  Stan:  "I'm not wearing any fur coat."

It's estimated that only 3 % of the silent films made throughout the world on nitrite cellulose remain in existence and most of the surviving footage is horribly damaged. On the other hand, it has survived those who appear in it and those behind the camera, both as original audience and crew, as well.  It's my sorrowful guess that less than 3% of those alive in 1919, for instance, survive today.