Black Robe

For some reason, I was in New York when I saw Black Robe in a downtown theater.  This must have been in 1991.  It's odd what one remembers from a film and a film-going experience.  Over the years, I have always recalled a scene in the which the movie's protagonist, Father Laforgue, is lost in a forest.  He encounters some Huron Indians with whom he is traveling and they are amazed that he has managed to get lost:  "How can anyone be lost here?" a Huron asks.  "The woods are made for man," adding 'you must have forgotten to look at the trees."  In another scene, Father Laforgue encounters a priest who has been tortured by the Iroquois:  the man has had his ears burned off and his fingers amputated.  He tells Father Laforgue that he yearns to return to New France to work for the salvation of the people who mutilated him.  After the movie, I remember two older Jewish men debating the picture:  "It's no different with the Sioux," one of the men said, referencing Dances with Wolves:  "They would just as soon cut out your heart as look at you."  The other man shuddered melodramatically.  Curiously, the most flamboyant thing in Black Robe, a remarkable little sorcerer, a malign dwarf with an elegantly painted yellow and green face must have made no impression on me -- I didn't recall this peculiar character in the film at all.  This shows that what we remember, of course, is not necessarily the most important aspect of a film or work of art, but, more or less, random, I think.

Black Robe (1991) was directed by the Australian Bruce Beresford based on a distinguished novel by the Northern Irish writer Brian Moore.  It's an excellent film, a little pedantic in some ways, but exceptional in its portrait of ways of life that are now wholly alien to us.  The film operates at a double remove from our ordinary experience:  first, the picture involves a Jesuit priest, anxious for martyrdom, who will stop at nothing to convert the Indians in New France -- that is, the wild mountains and enormous waterways in 1634 in Quebec.  The priest's uncompromising faith is portrayed realistically -- this is not a man with whom we can really identify, a harsh zealot, even, a self-mortifying fanatic.  And the priest's antagonists, the Indians of the old Northeast forests are utterly baffling in their motivations and conduct -- one old priest says that he has lived with Indians for twenty years and still knows nothing about them.  The movie is convincing in showing us the "Other" in horrific detail -- Father Laforgue, by modern standards, is alarming and the Indians are worse.  Nonetheless, the film slowly builds a sort of rapport with these strange personages from ancient history and, at last, we have the illusion, at least, of believing that we have learned a little about these people.  This is an aspect of Beresford's obsessively detailed reconstruction of life on the Canadian frontier (when the continent was all frontier) and his careful observation of the byways and behavior of the Indians among whom the story takes place.  Everything looks real and there are no sequences that seem contrived or unlikely, although, of course, in a bow to audience expectations there are some highly suspenseful and exciting scenes.  My one criticism of the film is that it is bit too aggressive in establishing parallels between the Indians and the French -- for instance, we see the old Huron chief putting on his war paint cut in parallel with a French soldier donning his ceremonial armor and uniform; images of Catholic religious practices are compared with the Indians' rituals.  This is really a criticism of the way some sequences of the film are cut -- the subject matter seems generally impeccable and is handled with a degree of dispassionate, almost scientific objectivity, that is unusual in films.  In some ways, the movie resembles a documentary.  

Father Laforgue is dispatched upriver in canoes piloted by Huron Indians.  The objective, a bit likethe project in Apocalypse Now, is a remote mission, 1500 miles away, and, perhaps, either destroyed or abandoned.  Laforgue is accompanied by Daniel, a young French adventurer, and an Indian family led by Chomina, the group's guid and a distinguished leader,, together with his wife and daughter, Annuka.  There are a few other Huron warriors and some dogs that ride in the canoes as the group paddles through spectacular landscapes of huge granite cliffs, towering domes of rock, placid lakes rimmed by a mountains in their autumnal glory, and terrifying waterfalls and rapids.  (Beresford understands that the film is a variant on a Western and that movies of this sort require sequences showing the protagonists as tiny figures dwarfed by an immense, beautiful and deadly wilderness - this is surely one of the most visually impressive and beautiful films ever made and, also, very effective in showing the vicissitudes of the weather; the movie ends with bleak wintry landscapes, a sort of embodiment of despair.  

Along the way, the Indians begin to despise Black Robe as they call Laforgue and plot to kill him.  Annuka is involved in a love affair with Daniel -- Black Robe is appalled by the Indians' apparent promiscuity and willingness to have sex with others watching.  The Huron engage a vicious Medicine Man, a nasty little dwarf, to exorcise Laforgue.  The dwarf spends his time howling at the Priest and shaking a rattle in his face.  In one scene, we see the dwarf riding in a canoe facing the poor Black Robe and bellowing at him as the other Indians paddle strenuously.  (In one striking image, one of Hurons lugs the dwarf up a steep icy hill, carrying him on his shoulders.)  The dwarf proclaims that he is not human but a spirit and counsels the Indians to abandon the priest.  Chomina is troubled by visions in which he sees a strange rock-girt island, a skull on a pole, and a weird-looking pale woman with long white hair, a She-Manitou that signifies death.  The Indians believe that dreams are prophetic and that they are more real than the tangible landscapes and people whom we encounter.  Ultimately, Black Robe is abandoned.  But when a Iroquois war party appear, the Hurons fight them and, after a gory skirmish, Chomina and his two daughters, together with Daniel and Laforgue are taken prisoner.  The Iroquois are horrifying, plotting gruesome torture for their captives.  They live in one of moviedoms great sets, a sort of wicker village made from interwoven twigs and vines, everything shuddering with impact of the frigid winter winds.  The Iroquois cut off Laforgue's finger using a a cowrie shell (with which they intend to skin their victims alive on the morrow).  Chomina's wife has been killed in the fight with the Iroquois and the Indians execute his little daughter by cutting her throat in front of him -- everyone accepts this stoically; it's just the way things are done.  Annuka has sex with a guard and gets him to cut her free.  She kills the guard and with Chomina, Daniel, and Laforgue escapes into the wintry wilderness.  Chomina is badly hurt -- it seems he has a collapsed lung from having to run the gauntlet of Iroquois armed with hammer-like stone clubs, another gruesome and protracted sequence in the film.  During the escape, Chomina sees a peculiar rocky island in the big river and knows that this is where he will die.  Laforgue tries to baptize him, but Chomina refuses -- "why would I want to go to a place where I will not see my woman and daughter?" he asks, the pale wraith of the She-Manitou hovering nearby.  Daniel and Annuka leave Laforgue again and he makes his way alone to the Huron Mission.  A fever has killed most of the Indians and they blame the priests for the contagion -- one of them has been hacked to death and his frozen corpse lies in the chapel.  The other priest is dying.  The surviving Huron conspire to kill the remaining French priest -- a warrior says that if the Huron adopt Christianity, they can no longer be fierce and, without being fierce, the Iroquois will slaughter them.  The dying priest asks Laforgue if he "loves" the Indians -- we see a montage of their faces including the terrifying Iroquois war chief and the malign dwarf.  Laforgue says that he loves the Indians and will work for their salvation.  At the end of the film, the Indians gather for the "water cure", thinking that Baptism will save them from the contagion -- they are obviously seeking Baptism not because they have been converted but out of blind superstition.  Laforgue baptizes them, George Delarue's score swells and we hear a choir singing in Latin, and, outside the rude chapel, the sun emerges from the clouds (this is a very cloudy and overcast picture) and, for a moment, blazes in a gold nimbus around the cross.  But this is just a set up for a sucker punch.  As we see the sun shining on the Mission, a title tells us that the Huron converted, were butchered by the Iroquois, that the Mission failed and, a few years, later the Jesuits returned to France.  (The ending is so bleak that it caused Roger Ebert to denounce the picture as too relentless grim to be watchable.)

The movie is cold and disturbing.  It is conventionally made and has a few too many close-ups for my taste.  But one can not gainsay it's brilliance and the script, by Moore, is astonishing. 

Visit, or Memories and Confessions

 There aren't many "confessions" in Manoel de Oliveira's autobigraphical essay film, Visit,  or Memories and Confessions.  The Portuguese film director is too obviously pleased with himself to confess any transgressions, although his wife, Marie Isabel, seems a bit mournful and admits, in highly elevated language, that being the spouse of a famous director is not exactly a picnic Sunday in the park.  (Oliveira's remarks on his relationship with his actresses, who embody for him the essence of the feminine and in whom he acknowledges becoming entangling, signify what might be part of the problem.)  The film does contain a "visit", that is, an invasion of Oliveira's fantastically tasteful and well-appointed house by an unnamed man and woman, a loquacious pair who quibble about philosophy, and just might be at the wrong address.  And plenty of memories are on display, in the form of old pictures and home movies projected directly at the viewer.  At first, one expects the picture to be modestly proportioned and slight, even whimsical -- but, Visit turns out to be no such thing; in fact, the film is wildly ambitious and encyclopedic, an account of Oliveira's aesthetics and a narrative of Portugal's history from the late nineteenth century to 1981 when it was made.  (Oliveira lived to be 106   and continued to make movies long after he had passed his centenary -- he died in 2015.  At the time the movie was made, apparently financed by the Portuguese Center for Film Arts, the director was 73. The film wasn't released, however, until May, 2015, posthumously:  one month after his death in April 2015,)

A man and woman, whom we never see except indistinctly very late in the film, are searching for a house that the woman has glimpsed once, but only at night and by the light of a single window illumined on the second story.  They approach Oliveira's gorgeous home, an ivy covered manse surrounded by ancient trees, and, after discussing some of the trees (imagined as guardians to the home), they find the door open and so, not without reservations, saunter into the place.  The interior is full of splendid objets d' art, thousands of old photographs, elaborate furniture and potted plants, and labyrinthine passages.  The man and woman tour the place, the woman, at least, nervous about being apprehended by the owner, a person that they seem not to  know.  During their tour, which is interrupted by monologues by Oliveira, the man and woman venture highly poetic and philosophical observations -- for instance, at one point, the woman says the "house is the world" and the man replies "therefore it is a ship".  (Oliveira is  interested in Camoes and the seafaring adventures of the Portuguese such as Magellan and Vasco de Gama..)  They discuss a magnolia tree outside the front door.  The couple spend the entire day in the house.  At twilight, the man says that this hour "is when we forget the spirit of revenge."  The woman agrees that this is fine thing.  The man notes that it would be better to have no "spirit of revenge" to forget in the first place.  Near the end of the film, it is dark and we see the man and woman from the rear, shadowy indistinct figures, walking down the lane away from the house in the gloom.  Sometimes, the woman suggests that there is a presence in the house, that it may be haunted in some way -- and, in fact, there is a ghost in the house, Manoel de Oliveira, typing away in an upstairs study on a "treatment" for his new film, a picture about Portuguese history.

About two-thirds of the film consists of Oliveira talking directly to the camera, once again in ultra-literate, highly abstract terms.  His subjects  include Portuguese history, his theories about film making, tributes to his long-suffering wife, and family chronicles stretching back to the days of his grandfather.  The whole enterprise has a feeling of foreboding and doom -- Oliveira tells us that he has lost the house, apparently by mortgage foreclosure, and that it has been sold to someone else, necessitating that he vacate the place where he has lived for forty years.  (Hence, I think, the notion of the "spirit of revenge" that afficts the otherwise equable director.)  Oliveira claims to be apolitical, probably a necessity given Portugal's vexed history, but recounts how he was arrested and interrogated aggressively, not tortured but questioned just to the point of torture, in 1960.  He talks about the April 25 revolution, an uprising that displaced the Fascists, apparently, but led to Oliveira's financial ruin -- no one would loan him money and so he has lost the house, although this situation is complex:  the property is adjacent to the family factory that once made "haberdashery" and this place has fallen into ruin although Oliveira still owes money on its enterprises; it's for this reason that the mortgage has been foreclosed on the home.  Oliveira shows home movies of himself as a child, playing with his siblings, and, then, films of his own children riding bicycles on the estate.  Early in his first monologue, Olveira says that he's "sacrificed everything to make movies" -- this doesn't seem even remotely true on the basis of the tour conducted by the man and woman.  (In fact, a theme of the movie is that the man and woman can see and observe things in the house, seemingly, invisible to Oliveira who is blinded to such insights by his familiarity with the place.  Certainly, the home is exemplary:  the woman notes that there's not a trace of dust anywhere, the thousands of framed pictures are all glistening under glass, and we don't see any garbage bags or towels on the floor -- the bathroom has a marble bathtub, but the toilet isn't shown.)  Like the man and woman's essay-like speculations, Oliveira's remarks are highly rarefied, abstract, and, even, metaphysical.  He discusses his faith in God or the Absolute as he calls it and describes his cinematic work as "the pursuit of virginity or sanctity" -- that is, an approach to the Divine.  (He says this is particularly true of what he calls his "tetralogy of thwarted love", films that he made in the seventies.)  Much of what he tells us is hard to understand and, unless you are student of recent Portuguese history, many of the picture's historical references will fall on deaf ears -- I barely know what "April 25" means, and, then, only from Pedro Costas' short film in Historico Centro.  Except for Pessoa, none of the names that he mentions mean anything to me and Oliveira, further, complicates his monologue by using many acronyms that mean nothing to someone not conversant with Portuguese politics and institutions)  Oliveira muses on his father who was an idealist and dreamer -- he built an important hydroelectric plant.  He shows us an irrigation ditch that has turned into a sixty foot high waterfall and provides with an account of some of his family's rural and agricultural property; he talks about deaths that he has witnessed and gives up a brief tour of Portugal's one and only film studio, noting that everything shot in a movie studio is by definition unreal and, therefore, because "artificial more real."  His wife, whom we have seen in innumerable pictures and who appears in the home movies, is shown in her garden, which seems vast, clipping red flowers.  Oliveira's discourse about film-making is like remarks by Godard or Tarkovsky -- most of the time, it is all metaphysical gobbledygook and impossible to understand.  Like Tarkovsky, Olveira acts as if film's are the product of the pure Will and that moviemaking is a metaphysical endeavor with angelic feet that never come close to touching the ground.  (This is despite the fact that Oliveira's films to the extent that I have seen them are intensely grounded in physical reality -- The Strange Case of Angelica contains detailed, documentary-like viniculture scenes and, even, the director's last feature film, Gebo and his Shadow, is noteworthy mostly for the impassive, stony sets in which the action takes place, rooms that look as if they were hewn out of raw granite.)  The movie ends with Oliveira speculating on the role of tiny Portugal in world history.  By this time, Oliveira has thoroughly equated himself with his country and its history.  We see a picture of him as a small child with long hair and wearing a dress and, then, the picture shrinks into the darkness of the universe and we hear the clatter of an old projector dragging a film lead through its sprockets.

I don't think I understood the picture fully and it's far too recondite for me to recommend for any one other than fans of this director.  But, on its own terms, the film is successful and worth seeing if you have an interest in Oliveira and his extravagant amour propre.   

The Royal Road

 If you fancy being lectured on the war with Mexico, complete will illustrative maps, by an argumentative butch lesbian, you will enjoy The Royal Road.  This is an essay documentary by Jenni Olson.  The film consists of still shots of Los Angeles and San Francisco cityscapes.  The images are invariably still-lives  and shot at dawn, it seems, when no one is up and about.  No people are visible -- I glimpsed a bike rider in the far distance in one of the long, static shots.  Traffic moves around and stop lights blink and there's some cozy-looking San Francisco fog in some of the shots.  But, by and large, the images are empty, lonely-looking, and, although beautifully composed, anonymous in form -- simply houses or buildings or bridges (the Golden Gate in S.F.) looking forlorn and vacant.  The narrative voice-over is divided into four parts.  In "My Hollywood Love Affair," the narrator describes a woman whom she desires.  She takes the train to LA to see the woman but the narrator's passion remains unrequited.  This part of the film addresses the El Camino Royale (the titular "King's Road") that runs the length of California -- at least from Mexico to Sonoma.  There is some discussion about Father Junipero Serra who is described in the currently fashionable parlance as an agent of genocide.  In "The New Girl", the narrator meets a woman at a party whom she admires and works assiduously to seduce her.  This part of the film involves an account of the War with Mexico as an imperialist venture -- hence, the slideshow involving maps of the States and Mexico.  (The motif of erotic conquest may have some tangential relationship to this imagery.) There is some discussion of old San Francisco and an account of Hitchcock's Vertigo.  The narrator maintains that she is the victim of nostalgia for old buildings just as Madeline in Hitchcock's film seemed to be afflicted by similar melancholy for the old Spanish past still faintly visible in the Missions around San Francisco.  There is a fascinating snippet of Tony Kushner lecturing that we must be "on guard" against nostalgia and that we should embrace "the new bad things."  Section 3 is called "In Defense of Nostalgia" -- it is only about forty seconds long and tells us that the narrator likes filming old buildings because they help her (in an increasingly digital world) stay in touch with the "old analog world."  "The Story of my Life" is the last section in the movie.  The narrative refers to Casanova's memoirs -- the famous seducer wrote his memoirs, a vast enterprise, working 13 hours a day to chronicle his love affairs when he had become impotent and unable to perform sexually.  The narrator identifies with Casanova and other famous seducers -- she sees herself as acting in their vein as she flirts with the woman that she desires.  "Like Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo," we learn, "this film is about love and loss and reveals more about me than I ever expected to say."  Like Scottie in Vertigo, the narrator choses to love emotionally distant, inaccessible women.  Like Madeline in that film, she is fatally nostalgic and entrapped by the past.  This is a minor film, interesting enough to sustain watching the full hour-long movie.  The narration is frequently a bit obvious but it's compelling.  The movie's wide range of reference seems similar to Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and other films of that sort.  The visuals are handsome but don't really add much to the film -- without the still and empty shots, the film's meaning would be about the same.  The snippet of Kushner's lecture makes me interested to seek out the book from which the material derives The Intelligent Homosexuals Guide of Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to Scriptures.  

Maska

Maska is a macabre short film directed by the Quay Brothers, eccentric movie-makers born in the United States but living in London.  The movie was made in 2010 and, apparently, financed through Polish arts agencies.  Accordingly, the film's spare dialogue and narration is presented in Polish.  The movie has an imposing, if dissonant, musical accompaniment by Krzysztof Penderecki (De Sonori Naturis).  The film is allegedly based on a short story by the famous Soviet science fiction writer Stanislaus Lem -- however, the Quay bros. adapt freely from their ostensible sources and its not clear to me how closely related the movie is to the writing on which it is based.

Maska concerns a rather scuffed doll with a ceramic face and weirdly pointed breasts that look a bit like the shells of snails, all mottled in tones of brown and dirty white.  This figure, called Duenna, is first shown lying supine on what seems like an operating table.  Several male creatures are spying on the half-naked Duenna from what seems to be some sort of cell shrouded behind a semi-permeable membrane.  (Much of the footage seems shot through smears of vaseline or dense swaths of parchment-colored fabric. In other scenes, the effigies seems submerged in murky water.  The images are dark and hard to decipher, although always interesting in a horrible sort of way.)  The two male figures are tiny bald mannequins with abraded faces and skulls, bulging blue eyes, and tiny, ineffectual limbs.  Duenna feels herself flooded "with gender" and arises from the table where she has been reposing like the Bride of Frankenstein.  She struts about a little, tall and imperious, with her nose partially knocked off -- clearly, a doll that has seen better times.  Then, she falls backward while the music howls and thuds and either gives birth (or splits apart like a chrysalis), revealing from her entrails a sinister and aggressive insect.  The creature is a chimera -- part praying mantis, part scorpion, and part spider: the critter has long cantilevered legs and glistening pedipalps.  The bug ends up at the bottom of a funnel-shaped indentation, a nasty place where it is gloomy and wet-looking.  Duenna had been dancing gravely with one of the guys with the red, raw scuffed faces.  This poor bastard slides down into the funnel where the bug promptly eats him.  Duenna ends up on the operating table again, motionless, and it seems like the cycle is about to begin again.  There's not a frame of this film that looks like anything you could imagine or expect, but, curiously, the general arc of the narrative is very predictable.  Long before Duenna disgorged her ravenous insect alter-ego, I expected her to turn into a carnivorous bug.  And the little male figures with their watery blue eyes, tiny arms, and badly abraded faces are clearly victims of their lust for the monstrous heroine -- they get, as it were,what they deserve.

This is a nasty little film, about 23 minutes long, and it's exquisitely horrible.  The images are all imperfect, half glimpsed, and the camera breaks the action, such as it is, into a montage of very short scenes that succeed one another almost too fast for the eye to register what is happening.  The animation of the puppets is herky-jerky and intentionally looks like clockwork automatons.  The stylish pictorial features of the film can't compensate, however, for the rather primitive narrative. It's threadbare -- there's simply not much there.

Uprising: the Legend of Michael Kolhaas

 Uprising:  the Legend of Michael Kolhaas is a French film directed in 2013-14 by Arnaud des Pallieres.  The movie, although handsomely produced with famous actors, is a mess, ineptly executed, an example of directorial malpractice.  Sometimes, the ways in which an ambitious movie fails are more interesting than a success.  So the picture repays some close attention.

First, Kolhaas is based upon an intractable novella by Heinrich von Kleist that is best appreciated in the abstract as a schematic study of justice and its limits.  Viewed up close, the novella deteriorates into a welter of characters who strut and fret their brief moment in Kleist's feverish prose and, then, are forgotten, their roles too opaque to be really understood.  Although the outline of the story is appealing -- a simple man who is misused by authorities seeks revenge -- the narrative's details are bizarre and fantastically intricate, involving elaborate political machinations by various late medieval rulers; the princes of Brandenburg and Saxony are entangled in the tale and Kolhaas' revolt has theological implications:  Martin Luther makes a cameo appearance; Kolhaas' uprising has superficial similarities to the peasant revolts inadvertently fomented by the Protestant Reformation and Luther is quick to protest civil unrest in the name of his doctrine.  The King of Poland gets involved somehow and, most of the story, involves political machinations that are very hard to follow.  Finally, the novella ends with an elaborate Gothic climax involving a gypsy's prophecies, a disputed line of succession and Kolhaas literally eating papers documenting the prophecy, a defiant act committed at the moment of his execution that sends the villainous prince into a nervous breakdown.  An exponent of Romanticism, von Kleist's ruthless and crazed prose is more akin to Edgar Alan Poe than Stendhal, for instance, and the novella is full of Sturm und Drang of the most exaggerated kind, all of this embedded in a complicated historical context involving much Machiavellian scheming.  The novella has a broad arc that seems superficially engaging and readily adapted -- what happens when a man relentlessly seeks justice? -- but the story's intricacies have defeated all film adaptations.  Indeed, Arnaud des Pallieres uses only the vaguest outlines of the tale and doesn't attempt to depict the befuddling political context, let alone the weird (politically incorrect) Gothic aspects of the story involving the gypsy and her prophecy and Kolhaas' final meal chowing down on the memoranda that explains the disputed line of succession among the Saxon nobility.  The movie's departure from Kleist's half-mad and reckless text is probably all for the good. One German critic has noticed that the last ten pages of the novella involve no less than 16 implausible coincidences. 

Here's the outline of the story that the film Uprising presents: A virtuous if somewhat dour and laconic horse trader leads a brace of beautiful animals over a rugged mountain pass.  This is Kolhaas, played by Mads Mikkelsen, a man whose face resembles an Asiatic version of the young Clint Eastwood carved out of olive wood -- he's both beautiful and inexpressive.  Kolhaas encounters a toll-gate.  He protests the toll and ends up leaving his two black stallions with the tollkeeper, the minion of a sinister Baron, while he passes through to sell his other horses to raise funds to pay for passage.  Kolhaas' servant Cesar is left to manage the horses.  Cesar does a poor job and finds the animals have been brutally mistreated and are damaged.  When he remonstrates with the Baron's thugs, they set vicious hounds on him and he is badly mauled.  Kolhaas comes back to find his horses ruined and his servant maimed.  He has verified that the Baron has no right to charge tolls to pass through his territory.  The hero refuses to accept the mutilated horses and demands that the Baron restore them to good health and pay damages to boot.  Kolhaas hires a lawyer who litigates the horse trader's claims to no avail.  Then, Kolhaas wife goes to the Princess (a rather shadowy figure) to appeal the claim.  Somehow, she gets beaten half-to-death and ends up dying back at Kolhaas' ranch.  So far this narrative tracks, Kleist's story closely.  Kolhaas raises a small posse of local ruffians and they attack the Baron's castle, killing the servants who mistreated the horses, Cesar, and the hero's wife  (The baron flees in a nun's habit.).  Kolhaas then besieges a convent in a scene that makes no sense at all.  He apparently burns the convent although nothing is clear about this aspect of the movie -- the comely woman that we see prostrating herself in the convent whom we assume to be the princess has nothing to do with the story; she's just some nun who happens to praying when Kolhaas' band attacks the place with a fiery arrows.  A clergyman comes to the outlaw camp and asks Kolhaas to cease and desist from his rampage.  But Kolhaas is intransigent and, apparently, continues his vendetta.  Then, things go completely off the narrative track.  Kolhaas who has refused at all cost to stand down from his vengeance decides for some reason to trust the princess.  He surrenders to her and, with his angelic small daughter, ends up in a dungeon.  There's more wrangling and Kolhaas is dragged out into a meadow somewhere to be executed -- seemingly, the meadow execution scene has to do with the production running out of money; a mountain meadow is cheaper than a full-blown set representing a medieval town square.  Bruno Ganz shows up in a thankless role as some sort of mediator.  He leads the villainous Baron, who is also fettered into the meadow, and says that the Baron has been in jail for two years, had to restore the horses to health, and has paid damages for mangling Cesar who has been dead, now, for a couple years. (It's not explained how any of this happened.)  Kolhaas accepts the money and horses, giving them to his daughter, and, then, has his head chopped-off.  The last hour makes no sense at all.  

The film has none of the world-historical scope of Kleist's story -- the real Kolhaas (and Kleist's hero) burns down the whole city of Wittenberg and, then, negotiates with princes and kings to persuade them to join his feud.  The movie's Kolhaas tramps around in the Languedoc mountains and sets afire the sheds around one convent.  A few people get murdered but this is done discretely off-screen -- the skirmishes are shot in such low lighting (Kolhaas always attacks at dawn) that we can't see what is going on.  The editing in simply atrocious -- eye-lines don't match and most scenes involving dialogue are shot in a peculiar way that suggests that the actors performing in the colloquy are on separate continents.  There are no master shots and so no one seems to occupy the same space with anyone else.  Kolhaas seems to be some kind of idiot -- he is so impassive as to be inert.  There's a typical Cable TV sex scene with Kolhaas' wife that ends with the angelic daughter interrupting them and saying inscrutably:  "You told me to interrupt you if I heard you making love."  What is this supposed to mean? And why would anyone tell this to a child?   A couple of examples will suffice to show the movie's inept construction and incommunicative editing.  In a skirmish scene, the screen goes black.  We see a sliver of light shining through a closed door.  The door opens.  Kolhaas enters.  He goes into a shadowy corner and rummages around in some kind of bin.  Then, the scene ends.  Why was it shot in this way?  Where is the door?  What is the building that the hero enters?  Why is he rummaging in a bin?  In another scene, the Princess finally appears and she is homely, dressed in funereal black, and moves like a serpent.  She twists and turns around the motionless Kolhaas, performing a sinuous pas de deux with him.  (No two people engaged in a serious discussion have ever interacted in this way from the very beginning of the world). Why is she writhing in circles around her motionless interlocutor?)  Then, the princess suddenly kneels?  Why?  A inserted shot shows two graves -- apparently, the tombs of Cesar and Kolhaas' wife.  Where are the tombs in relationship to the kneeling woman?  Here, of course, a master shot should show us where the tombs are located, where Kolhaas is standing and where the  princess is kneeling.  But we get no such shot.  Instead, the camera portentously pans to the left of the two tombs to show....what? a patch of grass.  It's a totally pointless camera movement, doesn't represent anyone's point of view, and just seems like some sort of mistake.  This is on par with the inept staging of landscapes and weather.  People move around in fog for a couple shots and, then, are shown in the bright sunny daylight.  Suddenly, it's night or dawn, always the "magic hour" in which can see very little at all.  It starts to rain, but in the next shot it's clear.  Horsemen are riding through a dappled forest.  In the next shot, they are on a high mountain terrace with black clouds dragging shadows over the landscape.  It's all a muddle.  Many of the shots are beautiful individually, but without coherent editing, the film is just a confusing slide show.   

Kesari (Saffron)

On the weekend of September 11, twenty years after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the airwaves are a backwash of cloying, maudlin commemorations.  Every TV station, cable and otherwise, is clogged with documentaries and sober retrospective analysis -- it's either appallingly jingoistic, nauseatingly sentimental, or misconceived.  All historical events appear necessary and foreordained and, therefore, all mistakes in judgment, also, seem to be callous and willfully stupid.  But, of course, history looks back from the comfortable thrones of present knowledge -- but people are condemned to live their lives in ignorance of the future.  The study of history doesn't prevent bad decisions from being made -- that is, history repeating itself.  It just causes those past mistakes to seem all the more painful since, in retrospect, every bad outcome is avoidable.  So the TV shows infesting the air-waves are, at once, smug and weirdly indignant.  And, of course, the displays of patriotic nationalism, an emotion that everyone seems to ordain as just and appropriate, are unseemly and contrived.  These documentaries want to chronicle events from two opposing and incommensurate viewpoints -- the horror was all avoidable, mistakes were made, and, yet, everyone in sight was courageous, patriotic, a hero (even when one's heroism consists of nothing more than being passively blown to pieces.)  It doesn't make any sense, particularly with the ghastly collapse of Afghanistan to the barbaric Taliban and there's nothing to celebrate, of course, and nothing new about any of the footage displayed or the talking heads pontificating on that subject.  The whole thing leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

So, I have found a particularly contrarian and nasty anodyne to this tide of 9-11 propaganda.  This is a film from 2019, made in the Punjabi dialect, called Kesari (d. Anurag Singh).  The movie chronicles the last stand of 21 Sikh soldiers against ten-thousand mujaheddin in the mountains of Afghanistan.  This is the sort of picture made with no concern for political correctness -- indeed, made with a certain vehement and nasty bigotry.  The picture is refreshing because its hatred is obvious.  The mullahs, as they are called in Afghanistan, are vicious, brutal savages -- they put the Apaches in old Westerns to shame with their cunning barbarity.  The Sikh soldiers are loveable, kind, generous, heroes to a man.  There's no complications of any sort and no attempt to portray events from the perspective of the hordes of villains.  (In old Westerns, there's always an obligatory scene showing the Indians being mistreated and abused mercilessly before they go on their rampage.  Nothing of this sort impairs the obvious moral calculus of Kesari.)  In some ways, the movie is so terrible that it's good --- the Sikh soldiers dance and sing, performing a sort of war-like Punjabi rap and there are plenty of musical numbers on the way to the movie's climactic carnage.  The film is without any self-insight at all -- it's all straight-ahead cowboys and Indians  (or Sikhs and mullahs) without any glimmer of self-awareness.  The critics have been universally scathing in their denunciation of the film (only 31% positive on Rotten Tomatoes).  But audiences are enthusiastic -- 88% approval among the popcorn-eating hoi polloi.  

The film's production values are excellent.  The movie is worth watching just for it's incredibly stark and imposing landscapes.  The action takes place on barren, totally treeless ridges with towering snowy summits in the background.  Specifically, the movie depicts three identical fortresses, square block-walled bastions that stand at the edge of four-thousand foot deep gorges. The fortresses, manned by brave Sikh warriors (all of them have the last name Singh) communicate by heliograph, mirrors that flash rays of sun in Morse code across the incredibly rugged country.  (This was the same way that the cavalry pursuing Geronimo in Arizona communicated with their headquarters.)  The hero, Havildar Ishar Singh, is doughty British subject who wears an enormous turban clipped to his head by elliptical bands of metal.  Havildar is on patrol at a bleak mountain pass when he sees about 30 mullahs chasing a woman.  The Taliban, as it were, intend to behead the woman for not being properly servile to her menfolk.  Of course, the Sikhs who believe in women's rights, are appalled and ask leave of their frosty, whey-faced British commander to intervene.  They are ordered to stand down:  the British don't care about such things as the emancipation of Afghani women.  But when the wild-eyed bad guys draw their crescent-shaped blades to behead the girl, the hero reaches up and adjusts his turban, the equivalent of rolling up his sleeves for a fight, and his buddy says:  "Oh mercy!" knowing the mayhem that ensues when a good Sikh gets "his Irish up" as they say (or don't and have never said.)  Havildar leaps over a breastwork of stones, firing his carbine in slow motion, and, of course, the mullah with the beheading sword drops dead.  Then, the hero rushes the bad guys to rescue the girl wielding his carbine like a club to knock down about 20 of the hapless mullahs.  When the bad guys overwhelm him and deliver a good beating with poles, the vicious Taliban threaten to yank off Havildar's turban -- "Behead me first!" he cries, "but don't touch my turban." At this desperate juncture, the other Sikhs disobey the British order to retreat and attack the Taliban, slaughtering them all.  This doesn't sit well with the Mullahs and they mount an assault in force on the fort -- it's called Fort Lockhart.  After about a hundred of the Taliban are gunned down, they retreat.  The British commander is enraged and demotes Havildar -- although in a peculiar way, calling him a coward and claiming that India breeds nothing but cowards and, then, saying that he is a "fucker."  A standing joke in the movie is that the Sikh are too proud to learn English and, in their language, in fact fahrker means "fierce and proud."  Havildar can't figure out why the nasty Brit is complimenting him at the same time that he is busted down to the ranks.  For some reason, Havildar is sent to command the Saragarhi Fort, another bastion midway between Lockhart and Guliston.  Nothing ever happens there and, when Havildar arrives, the troops are in their underpants betting on a cock fight.  Havildar is appalled and punishes the men by making them wrestle (yes, wrestle!) until the roosters tell them to quit.  (Another odd punishment.)  The roosters crow, singing out "cock-a-doodle-do" which the Sikh's here as "cook us".  So the roosters are turned into soup and fricassee.  This further enrages the virtuous Havildar who orders that no one is to eat for two weeks, obeying this decree himself in solidarity with his troops.  Of course, the soldiers come to love their commander.  Meanwhile, the wild-eyed Mullahs have declared a Jihad and are definitely off the reservation.  Throughout these proceedings, Havildar is teased by his wife who appears in hallucinations to chide him.  (He suggests that she'll get a real spanking when he comes home to his village.)  There are some musical number featuring lots of drumming and hopping around in the dust.  To show that the Sikh aren't prejudiced, the soldiers repair a local mosque and are rewarded by being given a single almond each by a cute old lady.  Havildar pinches the old lady's cheeks and she pinches his cheeks back and, then, they hug in a touching display of ecumenical affection.  (The Sikhs have also saved a little boy from being crushed when part of the decaying mosque collapses.)  There's lots of joshing among the Sikhs, mostly in a peculiar vein of homosexual horseplay -- the film is totally homophobic, as far as I can see, although the Sikhs seem tempted in that direction and the vicious Mullah sniper is portrayed as brazenly effeminate.  

The film's last hour is full of desperate heroics, and laconic warrior aphorisms.  This part of the picture is so spectacular and relentless that it is hard to dismiss. There is an aspect of the human spirit that relishes this kind of stuff -- last stands against implacable, wicked enemies -- and Kesari is the ultimate representation of this genre:  it incorporates elements from the battle of the Alamo and the great and relentless Zulu directed by Cy Enfield about the Battle of Rorke's Drift.  (The film's titles at the end of the movie listing the combatants and their medals of honor is identical to the last sequences in Zulu).  Although the battle scenes are ridiculous in a way, they are part of long tradition that originates in Homer's Iliad -- everything is bigger than life; the warriors recess the fighting from time to time to  engage in ceremonial exchanges of insults and the action stops, periodically, for declamatory speeches or scenes in which soldiers tend to, and, then, mourn their fallen comrades (most of whom utter pithy and memorable sententiae before breathing their last.).  Viewed objectively, the Iliad is full of highly problematic expressions of the warrior ethos -- but it would be difficult to deny the appeal of this sort of thing and Kesari's battle scenes, full of crazed Berserker fury, are undeniably impressive.  An enormous army of Pathans besieges the fort on the hill.  Havildar calls together his twenty troops and tells them that the British general has ordered them to retreat -- this is a lie, but Havildar wants to make certain that his soldiers are fighting for the proper motives.  Politics requires that Sikhs fight not for the "colonial oppressor" but for their "community" of righteous, egalitarian farmers.  Thus, the supposed order to retreat must be ignored and the Sikhs must each agree to participate in the desperate defense of the citadel.  (The British, in fact, have  callously decided the sacrifice the Sikhs in the fort to buy time to reinforce their two other bastions and have ordered them to hold their position.)   First, the barbarous Pathans behead the woman who is the cause of these hostilities.  This outrages Havildar who shoots the executioner from a distance of about two miles -- "how did the bullet carry so far?" someone asks.  "I had the wind at my back," Havildar says impassively.   Thousands of Pathans attack but are initially repelled by rifle fire from the fort's ramparts. The Pathans call a  parley and their troika of war lords demand that the Sikhs surrender.  One of the Mullahs says:  "You will lose the battle."  Havildar responds:  "We won when we decided to fight.  The rest is mere bloodshed."  This "mere bloodshed" then ensues for an hour with the Sikhs being killed in small groups as the fighting proceeds.  There's a desperate defense of the gate -- the Sikhs open the door and there is a rooster standing in the entry; this amazes the Pathans who are then beat back by a charge mounted by about five Sikhs -- they are all riddled with bullets but kill about a hundred of the attackers. Havildar engages in a sniper's duel with the effeminate shooter -- the villain is peppering a wounded Sikh with shots to lure rescuers (the scene is reminiscent of the ending of Full Metal Jacket).  Our hero manages to shoot the sniper, blowing up his gun, which fragments so that metal pieces spike his face.  Havildar has donned an enormous saffron-colored turban (dastar) which signifies fatalistic courage -- hence, the name of the film.  There are all the standard combat tropes:  a dying soldier broods about his mother and her garden; one Sikh perishes clutching a note sent to him by his little daughter which she has marked with a painted hand print; a young soldier is unable to shoot an enemy and says that he is afraid -- of course, he will engage in spectacularly courageous and defiant combat at the end of the movie.  Havildar conceives of the battle as the last stand of the righteous against the heathens and, further, dedicates the carnage to the one God and his Guru.  All men are equal, Havildar proclaims, and he deputizes the one Muslim in the force to carry water to the wounded on both sides since he believes that all injured soldiers are equal and deserve equal compassion when unable to fight.  (The poor Muslim, who is like the water-boy Gunga Din, ends up beheaded by his compatriots.)  At last, there are just two survivors -- Havildar and the boy who was, at first, afraid.  Havildar sticks his sword in a fire so that it is glows red-hot.  Then, he engages the Pathan horde in a long battle, killing huge numbers of them before he's cut-down.  "Wow!" says one of the mullahs when Havildar has impaled one man on his red-hot sword and is killing about twelve others using the metal clip from his turban -- the turban literally becomes a weapon of war.    Although wounded in a dozen places, he's still alive.  A noble Muslim orders that his turban not be touched.  The boy flees into a tower that the Pathan's set afire.  He emerges, entirely sheathed in weird CGI flames, purifying fire, it seems, strolls right into the midst of the Pathans and embraces their leader setting him ablaze and the bomb that he is apparently carrying.  The dying Havildar recites a Sikh poem that all are saved who proclaim that God is one.  There is a montage of the corpses, some of them spectacularly riddled with swords, and the titles tell us that all 21 Sikhs were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and that, to this day, the battle is celebrated (remarkably it took place on September 12, 1897) annually -- there are two Guwundar (public meeting places) dedicated to its memory.  A nationalistic hymn plays on the soundtrack -- "Saffron is my color," the singer croons.       

It's impossible not to admire the audacity and ferocity of the film's climactic battle and there are problematic macho elements buried in the souls of most men that will find this material inspiring -- women, I think, will be left cold by the absurd and, fundamentally, pointless carnage.  Some aspects of the final battle are disturbing -- after the Sikhs show how brave, sportsmanlike, and generous they are, they send two prisoners among the Pathan horde who are equipped with suicide bomber vests and blow a huge hole in the Muslim army.  (Indeed, there's a sort of predilection for people blowing themselves up.)  The British and a large group of Sikhs seem to be observing the battle, but exactly how and where isn't clear.   There's a subplot about the Sikhs running out of ammo that is raised and, then, simply abandoned -- dead Sikhs are shown in the end surrounded by hundreds of spent cartridges. And the politics of the battle are problematic -- it's as if the Alamo were fought to preserve slavery in the old South.  (And I guess this turns out to be true.)  The net effect of the slaughter is that the British who are called "oppressors" in the film, and portrayed as worse than the Muslims, perpetuate their hold over Punjab and India's northwest.  Sikhs in Indian media have perfected this material over several iterations, including an epic poem written in 1915 and, at least, two television series as well as other filmed versions.  When someone remarked that there seem to be too many shows about this battle, a representative of the Sikh community said that there should be, at least, 21 films since there were 21 heroes and each deserves commemoration.  The film is concerned to list the names of the combatants -- the roster of heroes is shown, at least, three times and one of the soldiers writes each name on a wall when the man is killed; this is the kid who is lit on fire at the film's denouement and, of course, he writes his own name on the wall before retreating to the tower where he is immolated.  It's easy to remember the last names of each of the warriors -- it is Singh; the word means "lion."  This film is like a demented hybrid of John Wayne and Rudyard Kipling and really has to be seen to be believed.  

Historic Centre

 Historic Centre is an omnibus film consisting of short subjects by well-known Spanish and Portuguese directors. (with a Finn thrown in for a good measure).  It seems to  have been compiled in 2016 and commissioned by the Portuguese city of Guimares, the oldest settlement in that country.  (Perhaps, the film celebrates some kind of centennial.)  With one startling exception, there's nothing in the movie worth watching.  Two of the four films seem to have only a tangential connection to Guimares.

For some reason, Aki Kaurismaki, the great Finnish director, contributes a 10 minute clip called "O Tasquiero" ("The Tavern man").  It's like a parody of Kaurismaki's better work.  A melancholy waiter comes to his tavern located on an alley near the town square.  He serves three miserable alcoholics, presumably regulars, as soon as the place opens.  He cooks some soup.  Down the street, on the historic plaza, there's a successful cafe full of tourists.  The tavern-keeper disconsolately dines there.  He makes his chalk-board menu seem more attractive -- he changes the notation Sopa (1.5 euros) to Sopa de Pescadores ("Fisherman's soup" for 2.5 euros).  Still no one buys. The tavern-keeper who has a long gaunt face and looks like Ichabod Crane has a date for the night.  He goes to a barber who cuts his hair and, then, has his shoe's signed.  Some musicians croon  sad songs in the background -- literally sitting behind the morose hero when he is getting his hair cut.  The woman coming for the date, apparently, by bus, doesn't show up.  The tavern-man pitches his bouquet of roses in the garbage, goes home and has a drink, and, then, sets out a cup of milk in the alley for the cats.   All of this is beautifully shot, each image like a gorgeous still life, but there's nothing here and the film is so dead-pan as to be DOA, -- nonetheless, "O Tasquiero" is veritably novelistic compared with Manoel de Oliveira's contribution and the ridiculously pretentious film produced by Pedro Costas.  The Oliveira film can be dealt with in a few words:  a tour guide speaking in heavily accented English leads tourists to the plaza in the "historic center" of Guimares.  There's a big, ominous statue of a knight in full armor, the so-called conqueror.  Everyone takes pictures of the statute and so the tourist guide declares the "conquistador has been conquered" by those snapping photographs of him.  It's witless and stupid, although the segment is also very, very short.  (Guimares certainly didn't get its money's worth with this little dollop of a film, evidence, perhaps, of the centenarian director's senility.)  The film by Costas is unbearably bad.  (Costas is a fantastically tedious, if politically correct, director and I have never found any merit in any of his films.)  In Historic Centre, Costas is represented by a half-hour picture that is simply foolish and that, like the Kaurismaki offering, seems to be some sort of mannered parody of the director's very distinct, if irritating, style.  The movie begins with handsome Africans posed picturesquely in a dark garden or,  perhaps, quarry.  The people are all motionless and statuesque and impressively lit.  They keep calling for someone named "Ventura".  After about ten minutes of this, the film cuts to a man on a gurney being shoved into what seems like a hospital elevator.  Next we see Ventura, a handsome old man with a bald head (this guy is in all of Costas' films).  Ventura stands next to a demon-soldier.  The soldier's face and hands are bronze and he seems to be wearing a bronze uniform and carrying a bronze machine-gun.  Ventura whines about not being able to stay in his home country of Cape Verde.  (He literally whines, making weird howling and barking sounds.)  The soldier talks about tormenting him.  From the colloquy, which is extremely obscure, we learn that Ventura has been a migrant worker in Lisbon for 38 years -- he is now apparently dying and this elevator ride (which lasts for 20 minutes in a steel box) represents a hallucination of his death.  Ventura talks about missing his wife and children.  He recalls a revolution in which work ceased when he was laboring to build the headquarters for the national phone company. (This was the military uprising in 1974).  There's a suggestion that the soldier tortured Ventura at one point.  The demon soldier, who seems like animated statuary, taunts Ventura.  Then, the elevator stops and Ventura gets out and, in the film's one witty moment, the damn thing flashes that it is going down -- presumably into the sub-basement of Hell.  Then, we're back in the quarry or garden or whatever it is, now during the daylight.  Ventura is sitting in a cleft rock.  Someone grins at him and says "I heard you went to the doctor".  Presumably, the garden represents Cape Verde and, in death, Ventura has returned to the his homeland.  The movie is extremely dull and difficult to understand.  

But there is one segment of the film that is tremendously moving and effective, perhaps, one of the greatest films ever made about human need to work.  This is Victor Erice's "Vidrias Partidos" ("Broken Windows").  The film is heightened documentary and seems a highly poetic and affecting version of the sort of political films made by Straub and Huillet.  It's minimalist but doesn't seem impoverished and every camera set up is exquisitely calibrated to the effects the film aims to achieve.  Ostensibly about the closing of a textile factory at the Vizela River, the movie expands to be about memory, human happiness, capitalism and labor, and how we shape the past in our imagination.  Erice starts with some elegant shots of the abandoned factory, a huge structure that produced fabric and yarn between 1845 and 2002 -- now it's called the "factory of the broken windows."  We, then, see a sort of exhibit -- some very large photographs or a cafeteria or dining hall full of what seem to be several hundred workers eating their midday repast.  (This is Portugal and the workers have bottles of wine on the tables and, probably, are eating a massive lunch of the sort that the finest restaurants in this country would be unable to serve.)  Then, a former worker appears, a woman:  she tells us she worked in the factory and was given a half-hour to nurse her newborn baby in that refectory; she recalls that she used to carry her baby brother to the factory so her own mother could nurse him -- the infant cried on the way to the factory but was more content during the walk home.  (Another woman tells a similar story -- the interviews are styled "screen tests.")  A technician talks about keeping the spinning machines running for forty years -- he is obviously proud of his work.  He itemizes some terrible injuries he sustained to his hands.  Another woman explains how she left her groom at the altar because he had lied to her, worked in the factory, and, then, emigrated to Paris, first and, then, Normandy where she cared for animals.  She married a Frenchman and had children with him but now that she is a widow she has come back to Portugal.  A man tells about how he fought in the war in Mozambique and, then, worked in the factory until it closed.  He explains that the factory can't compete with the near slave labor wages paid in places like Indonesia and Cambodia.  An old woman says that she never found any happiness in her life although "of course, there were moments of joy" -- she spent many years working in the factory and wonders what it would be like to be happy.  A man says that the workers were hitched to their machines like horses to wagons.  A woman tells us that her parents made her go into the factory when she was 12 and that her one regret is that she wasn't educated enough to work in an office or bank.  One woman has hearing loss due to the noise of the machines and has had to have an ear-drum transplant.  These people appear to be fantastically eloquent and speak with amazing force and authority -- I suspect that they are actors who have been hired to recount the work narratives by men and women who were employed in the factory.  But the accounts are enormously moving and poetic.  Each person speaks to the camera -- their positions are slightly varied to keep the format from becoming monotonous:  sometimes, they are already posed; other times, they enter the frame.  Titles introduce the shots as being "takes" or "screen tests" in the movie.  The only worker who is shot in close-up is the 77-year old woman who questions the nature of happiness.  When the sequence of testimonials is complete, the camera reverses angle and shows the people, one after another, facing the large photograph of the dining hall.  The witnesses now address the picture and speak to the people shown in it -- these were lives full of "unhappy joy", the old woman says, mirroring her own plight.  Then, an actor appears and recites lines from a Marxists play about labor -- he tears off his worker's clothes to reveal that he's nattily dressed in suit and tie.  He ends his recitations with the comment that the world has dematerialized -- "work is virtual"; "we're all caught in the web," referring to the internet.  A final witness sits in front of the picture and discusses how his father and grandfather were renowned local musicians and spent their lives in the factory.  He, then, says that he never worked in that place and that he went to college and is now professional musician.  We seen an accordion posed in front of the picture -- "screen test of an accordion", the title tells us. The man takes the accordion and, turning to the image, plays it.  The camera explores faces in the picture.  One of the women said:  "They look sad because they know they have to return to work."  But the narrative is very complex.  No one really complains about the factory and everyone seems to have appreciated the chance to earn a living there.  And the old laborers show an enormous pride in their productive labor in the place.  This short film is one of the great explorations of industrial labor -- I have lived in a slaughterhouse town for 42 years and can attest to the picture's essential truth.

Erice was an odd film-maker with a strange career.  He made a very great masterpiece The Spirit of the Bee Hive in 1973, El Sur, another estimable picture, released in 1983, and an abstract, but reportedly beautiful film, The Quince Tree Sun in 2010.  His Wikipedia entry hasn't caught up with the short subject made for Historic Centre but, I think, it's also a masterpiece.  

The Endless Film

 The Buenos Dias Film Archive houses fragments of movies that were begun but never completed.  This footage exists in raw form, often showing the clapboard initiating the shot, or marred with ink or other markings.  Leandro Listorti, an Argentine film-maker, has cut some of this footage together to comprise a 57 minutes feature, The Endless Film (2018) -- the Spanish title uses the word "infinite" for "endless."  The film is experimental, of course, and has no narrative -- indeed, Listorti has adopted a Dadaist approach to this footage and seems to have cut it together in a haphazard and intentionally inexpressive montage.  The film shows people in a car talking to one another (B & W without sound), a man who looks like a criminal pursued by another shaggy-looking guy -- hairdos in the B & W footage date the images to the early and mid-seventies.  A girl talks on the phone, a bald guy in a decaying, ornate building with a cast-iron spiral stairs attempts to replicate the famous Da Vinci image of man as the measure of all things -- there's lots of showy chiaroscuro (apparently, this film had a reasonable budget); there are some animated monster; in a showy scene a pretty girl (she was talking on the phone in any earlier technicolor sequence) shoots through an aquarium and hits a bad guy -- she seems to be a spy of some sort.  There's a deserted beach with some pergolas and abandoned chairs; at the end of the movie and man and woman enter from the foreground and walk away from the camera -- the woman sits in chair a long way from the camera; the man inexplicably continues his trudge through the sand.  We see a little elegant-looking pornography, machine diagrams, and, for a pointless political frisson, a fragment of a B & W doc with sound extolling the importance of "authority" -- apparently, an artifact of the military junta that once controlled the country.  A couple of period pictures are cut into the montage.  There's an interesting shot of a river flowing down through brush and over some rocks with women doing laundry in the creek downstream.  (I immediately recognized this as a scene from Zama, although I don't know what gave me this idea -- and, reviewing the closing credits, I found that someone tried to make a version of Zama, known now through Lucrecia Martel's impressive but unsuccessful version, back in 1984.  There's some cheesier footage -- a clip from something that looks like a spaghetti Western shows a man sweating in front of a hearth while some desperados aim a shot gun at him.  The most interesting aspect of the film is the credit list of incomplete pictures cannibalized to make the movie -- among those films, I noticed an early picture by Lucrecia Martel, something called Eternauta  shot in 2009.  This picture seems to be the source of the color footage with the pretty girl and the gun.  (I think the final shot on the beach is also from this incomplete movie.)  The internet tells me that Eternauta is a science fiction comic book by Hector German Oesterheld and Francisco Solano Lopez published in 1957 or thereabouts and repeatedly the subject of efforts to adapt to the screen (projecto maldita ) -- apparently, the story will appear on Netflix soon.  I can't tell you any more about this peculiar projecto maldita because I don't read Spanish.

The movie is pointless.  Listorti is doggedly humorless and avant-garde -- in comparison to a film of this sort made with genius, Guy Madden's The Green Fog, this picture is dull, irritating, and a slog.  Listorti makes no effort to redeem the material, doesn't edit it together into any semblance of a narrative, and doesn't show any trace of humor in dealing with these fragments of damaged film maudit. And the footage compiled doesn't have much intrinsic interest -- the camera is usually too far from the subject matter to be expressive or the compositions are wrong or the lighting is either too bright or too dim.  

The River Runner

 The River Runner (2021) is a fraudulent little sports documentary about white-water kayaking.  It does everything that 100 Foot Wave does but in a more primitive and obvious manner; however, The River Runner was the virtue of being 4 1/2 hours shorter than the HBO series and more explicit in its cruelly deceptive premises.  The film's plot is virtually identical to 100 Foot Wave: a nasty dysfunctional jock with a painful upbringing discovers solace running his kayak over waterfalls.  He sets out on a quixotic quest to run (one might say "desecrate") the four sacred rivers flowing from the holy mountain of Kailash in west Tibet.  These rivers flow through enormous gorges, some of the deepest on earth, and the huge bodies of moving water pour over a series of vast cataracts.  The hero, who no one likes, desecrates successfully three of the rivers but, then, encounters health problems -- in his case, a brain tumor said to be the size of a baseball.  He's also become obsessed, self-absorbed, possibly alcoholic, and a thoroughly nasty fellow.  After recovering from brain surgery, the river runner can't bring himself to paddle over any more waterfalls for eight years.  He learns his cancer has returned.  As a last hurrah, he travels to Pakistan to desecrate the last river.  This venture is successful and, back in the States, he learns that his cancer is in remission and that, miraculously, the holy river has healed him.  All of the usual suspects are on view:  we meet his blonde, vain mother, his disapproving brother, his blonde, self-absorbed and bitter girlfriend.  Early in the film, a kayaker dies to establish the stakes.  There is lots and lots of picturesque, if repetitive, footage of gorgeous, massive cascades with fools dropping through the white water in kayaks.  The film (streaming on Netflix) adheres so closely to 100 Foot Wave's format that it almost seems a parody of the HBO series. (The main difference is that the surfers in the HBO show were just stupid and misguided; the kayakers seem to be complete morons.) I found offensive the notion that paddling down a river can cure cancer.  The gorges and cataracts are appealing but they look better without a  candy-colored rubber kayak bobbing around in them.  These films are directed by manly men with manly names -- this one is made by someone with a name like Jed Rush or Todd Tuff.  Everyone wears Red Bull hats.  

State Funeral

Sergei Loznitza's State Funeral (2019) is an astonishing, mind-numbing spectacle.  The documentary chronicles the obsequies of Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, the Soviet tyrant who died in the dead of Winter in 1953.  The film is grandiose on the largest scale imaginable.  It's also virtually unwatchable.  Loznitza is a very scrupulous and calculating film-maker.  One of his calculations, valid if highly challenging to the viewer, is to construct his film on an enormous scale both pictorially and in terms of the time that he uses to document the funeral -- the movie is almost three hours long and the film's duration is an important strategy, showing us how totalitarianism operates and how it is experienced by its victims.  The funeral becomes a relentless universe, a vast sepulchral space in which armies of zombie mourners wearing red arm bands shuffle back and forth.  Hollywood used to advertise films made "with a cast of thousands" -- on the evidence of this movie, State Funeral has a cast of hundreds of thousands; we behold icy-looking vistas packed with somber people, all of them heavily muffled and with an astonishing array of fur hats, extending from the close foreground literally to the horizon.  Stalin's funeral is like a enormous, lethal black hole that sucks everything into it.  The viewer is left exhausted, but also benumbed and bored almost to tears.  One vast procession follows another and just when the repetition becomes almost unbearable, the Soviet apparatchiks begin their speeches, each filmed in its entirety while the entire nation, it seems, stands close-packed in a vast grim assembly with people crowded literally to death between enormous walls and towering colossal figures of the deceased dictator.  (Although there's no footage of this in the film, a stampede near the Kremlin killed at least 140 people -- most accounts put the death toll well over a thousand.  If course, the cameramen recording the proceedings weren't invited to take pictures of this carnage.)  Loznitza establishes certain rules from the outset -- there is no commentary, no pundits describe what we are seeing, and there is no context provided for the footage.  In a few early shots, a subtitle describes where individual sequences in the film were shot -- one of the movie's contentions is that the entire Soviet Union mourns Stalin and, so, staggering multitudes are shown in various cities including places with bright sun and high mountains in the background.  At the end of the movie, we are shown mourners standing by their reindeer sleds and people grieving in Siberian wigwams and Mongolian yurts.  But except for these footnotes and a lacerating final group of titles, no attempt is made to explain the macabre spectacle that the film presents.

The film begins with shots of a hearse depositing Stalin's bright red casket at an official building somewhere.  We see what can be construed as family members, although no one is identified.  Some bureaucrats look on as the casket is opened and we see Stalin's waxy cadaver, dressed in a resplendent uniform, a bit like an old Kodak polaroid that is partly faded:  a close-up shows us the dictator's clawlike hands -- the lower half of his body is covered with a sort of red apron.  Footage alternates between brilliantly restored technicolor --  either Kodak technicolor or German Agfa film-stock and deep focus and velvety black and white.  The greatest cameramen in the USSR were marshaled to make movies of the funeral and their work is gorgeous, epic, and beautifully composed.  (The documentary film project was edited by March of 1953 and complete for release about a month after Stalin's death.  But already doubts were raised about the political viability of the project.  The film was shelved and never released.  Loznitza's picture is constructed from the actual negative for the documentary movie made in 1953 intercut with other striking footage found in State Archives.  Essentially, the film proceeds by showing us a few far-flung assemblies of mourners, loud-speakers providing an eerily detailed and gory account of Stalin's death.  The footage alternates between grandiose landscapes crowded with enormous featureless multitudes and close-ups showing handsome representative mourners.  Next, we see foreign dignitaries arriving.  Then, there are long sequences showing people hauling eight-foot tall wreathes resplendent with hundreds of roses --  even though this is in February in Russia.  The wreathes are so big that two people have to lug them up against Kremlin walls.  The open casket sits atop a bier that is three stories high, precariously tilted downward, the corpse half-drowned in a sea of flowers and green laurel, hundreds of red banners hanging from the ceiling while an endless procession hurries by, a million people moving at what seems to be a brisk trot.  Next, there are vast parades.  A lot of the middle hour of the movie is vague to me because I fell asleep and only awoke, now and then, to see that nothing had changed -- soldiers stood in huge phalanxes barring vast avenues, women wept or dabbed tears from their eyes, Chopin and Mendelsohnn's Death March are played in an endless loop -- a half hour later, it's the same spectacle utterly without change.  Sometimes, the red casket is moved here and there by armies of men.  Finally, the casket, with a  little bubble so that the dictator can peer out at his people, ends up under the grim ziggurat of Lenin's mausoleum.  First, Malenkov, who seems to be a complete idiot speaks -- he says that Stalin was the greatest genius of all time.  Then, Beria, who looks a little like Bob Hoskins, growls out his speech -- Stalin was the greatest leader of all time.  Malenkov who has little swinish eyes looks baffled by Beria's speech.  Then, Molotov tells the assembled millions that Stalin was the greatest leader in all of history.  Krushchev plays MC and says that the funeral is now over.  The casket is hauled into the darkness of Lenin's tomb and the screen goes black.  But Loznitza has saved some of the most jaw-dropping scenes for the last ten minutes.  The camera shows a montage of mourners from the Black Sea to Vladivostok.  At an enormous hydroelectric plant under construction, workers like tiny ants stand on immense pylons with a five-story image of Stalin draped over a pier.  A big picture of the tyrant hangs over the enormous construction site and, then, seems to fly over the bulldozers and colossal trucks -- a towering crane, which we don't see, is moving the picture of the dictator.  Again the screen goes black and then fades in to snowfall.  A giant wave of man-high wreaths and flowers seems to have broken surf on the sea against the Kremlin wall and that camera slowly pans across the hundreds and hundreds of yards of memorial wreaths.  On the soundtrack, we hear a kitschy lullabye sung by a woman about a little baby boy being lulled to sleep.  A final title tells us that Stalin murdered 27 million of his compatriots outright and killed another 15 million by famine.  His corpse was pulled out of the Lenin mausoleum in 1961 and is now buried in a modest niche in the Kremlin wall.

The film that State Funeral most resembles is Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will -- there is the same lethal, stupefying monumentalism, the same colossal stage architecture and scenery, the same interpolated shots of perfectly selected ethnic types, here grieving for the great man -- handsome peasants and doughty soldiers are featured in the crowd.  And like Triumph of the Will, rarely shown in its huge and deadening entirety, the film climaxes with a series of majestically dull speeches that are mindless, sinister, and ridiculous all at the same time.  Loznitza is playing a dangerous game:  either the film is a monstrous nightmare or an ugly invitation to nostalgia for the greatness of the deceased mass-murderer.  In fact, in an interview accompanying the film, Loznitza acknowledges that people either abhor what they are seeing or interpret the film as a grandiose tribute to a great fallen leader.  He suggests that in Russia, audiences are about equally divided on this subject.  What I found appalling about the film is that it is uniformly somber and totalizing in its effect -- we don't see anyone who seems bored by the idiotic ranting politicians, no one gets out of step in the interminable military parades, there's no sign of human frailty:  no one has to go to the bathroom, even the smallest children seem perfectly attuned with the movie's tone of macabre majesty.  Is it really possible that a million people crowded into Red Square and no one had to pee or suffered from diarrhea?  Were the Russians really this grief-stricken by the demise of a man who was truly monstrous in all ways?  Why aren't we shown something to break the mood of interminable, horrible splendor?  Couldn't Loznitza find out-takes that might have humanized these ghastly proceedings?  In this country, we talk about dog whistles -- State Funeral seems dog whistle of vast proportions aimed at the nationalist right-wing in Russia.  

(There's an amusing colloquy by ZOOM between Sergei Loznitza and the Italian director Pietro Marcello who made the Marxist-inflected Martin Eden.  Loznitza is bland, pale, and barely moves, sitting stolidly in the center of the frame; by contrast, Pietro Marcello guzzles coffee, flaps his hands wildly, a couple times almost knocking over his laptop, and, then, lights up a cigarette and nervously smokes.)

  

Ikarie XB-1

 Fortunately for mankind, the Soviet bloc prevailed in the race to space and, in the year 2135, a rocket ship named Ikarie XB-1 is winging its way to Alpha Centauri on a mission to find other intelligent life in the universe.  Ikarie's crew is male and female, as well as multi-national (if not multi-racial), but everyone speaks fluent Czech.  The venture is non-hierarchical -- there's no Captain Kirk ordering other crew members around.  The space explorers flirt with one another and dance to the pings and pongs of electronic music and bitch about their space rations -- but the crew dutifully eat their wafer-like vitamin pills:  no one wants to suffer from "avitaminization" as the subtitles tell us.  Of course, things go badly wrong and, as it turns out, manned intergalactic space flight is a kind of nightmare, although the film intermittently brims with faux-Socialist optimism and, ultimately, all's well that ends right.  Ikarie XB-1 is a 1963 Czech science fiction film based on the novel The Magellanic Cloud by Stanislaus Lem.  It's rather bland and presents us with all the familiar tropes in space expedition shows, particularly Star Trek which it resembles to some extent, but one must take note of the film's date -- much of the stuff that we see in Star Trek and, even, 2001 has its origin in this movie.  

Ikarie begins in media res with a character gone totally mad -- we can tell this because his grooming has gone awry (he has a ghastly five o-clock shadow and his forehead is sweaty).  The man is wandering the stark corridors of the space-ship declaring that "Earth is gone!" and "Earth is dead!" waving a phaser (it's called a "blaster" in this movie), periodically shooting out the eyes of the surveillance cameras monitoring him.  From this rather dire prolegomena, the film flashes back to happier days.  The crew of Ikarie is enjoying their space-flight, a 15 year probe to Alpha Centauri (in which they will age only 28 months due to Einstein relativity factors).  The crew members chat with past lovers by television communication and shower together in a facility that looks like a Planet Fitness health club.  Everyone seems fit and merry.  The men have square jaws and military haircuts.  The women are attractive with exuberantly painted eyebrows and pale faces.  The crew sit at consoles, watching inscrutable displays on monitors, and each manning  about six identical, unlabeled buttons.  Pretty soon trouble arises.  The space ship encounters a derelict flying saucer.  Two spacemen board it and find that the ship is full of corpses attired as if to attend a fancy dinner party -- this is a remnant of the bad 20th century when the forces of Capitalism thought themselves ascendant.  The Americans (it is implied that this vessel is an American space probe) are transporting nuclear weapons in outer space and, due to some obscure contretemps, have killed each other off using a nerve gas bizarrely called "Tigger Fun."  Accidentally, the two space-men from Ikarie detonate a nuke on board and that's the end of them.  Next, Ikarie flies too close to a sort of Black Hole that's emitting deadly radiation.  Two men who have space-walked on the outer deck of the craft to fix a motor are badly burned and one of them, Michal, goes mad, wandering around the ship with his blaster shooting things.  (This story brings us back to the film's present-day).  A strange sleeping sickness, due to radiation poisoning afflicts Ikarie's crew -- everyone falls asleep for 26 hours.  But they revive, capture the marauding Michal and cure him, and, then, the voyage continues.  It is discovered that some kind of force field is protecting Ikarie and, in the film's final scenes, we discover that this shield has been intentionally created by benign aliens living on the "White Planet".  The aliens on the White Planet are assisting our heroes and have protected them from the deadly radiation.  In the last moments of the film, the space ship descends through the atmosphere to the White Planet.  The clouds part and there is revealed...'

The film is a bit naive and idealistic.  There's a faithful robot named "Patrick" who looks a lot like Robbie in the movie The Forbidden Planet and is similar to the bemused butler-bot in Lost in Space.  The space ship zips across a dark background painted with galaxies and nebula with a zooming sound.  But the  picture is brisk, zips along like the Ikarie itself, lasting only 88 minutes and some of the scenes are genuinely frightening and suspenseful.  Production values are generally good; the acting is excellent and some of the effects -- for instance, the zero-gravity scenes -- are very well-done.  Of course, there is lots of striding around in corridors that look like the inside of a particularly hygienic post-modern hospital and space-men also climb up huge spindly ladders in dark and cavernous voids in the Ikarie.  It's impossible to tell the actors from one another -- some are older and others younger, but you can't remember their names.  It doesn't matter -- the talent is all pretty much fungible.  The film's political subtext is mostly invisible -- the movie is not that much different from a very superior and well-written episode of the old Star Trek series.  American International bought the rights to the picture and re-released it as Voyage to the End of the Universe eliminating an obstretrical sub-plot (the first infant born in Outer Space!) and changing the last couple shots to completely falsify the narrative.  (Ikarie doesn't show us the space aliens and gives us only a glimpse of their planet when the clouds part in the last scene; American International makes everything clear, but ultra-confusing.)  There's a bizarre line in the middle of the Czech film:  "We weren't told that there were things in outer space we couldn't expect," someone moans after encountering some unexpected dangers.  What?  If every thing was expected and known, then, what was the point of the voyage in the first place?  The film is directed by Jindrick Polok blithely renamed Joe Pollock in the American International version.  

 

Struggle: the Life and Lost Art of Szukalski

 A curious network of people are responsible for the fascinating documentary Struggle:  The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski (2018).  The film's director is someone named Irek Dombrowolski.  But the film is produced by Leonardo di Caprio, the movie star, with his father George di Caprio.  Most the people interviewed for the film are associated with underground comix, either drawing or collecting comix ephemera.  The odd man out in this peculiar assembly of folks is the famous author Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands among other well-known books), an Ivy League professor and savage critic of Donald Trump.  Snyder comments, at length, about the implications of Szukalski's work in Poland particular in the context of ultra-nationalist politics in that country.

Struggle cheats a little, implying that no one knew anything about Szukalski until he was discovered by a ragtag band of renegade comic book artists and rock 'n rollers.  This strategy works well because, in fact, Szukalski, who was once a very famous figure, was almost entirely forgotten after World War Two.  The style of his art was old-fashioned, lurid, and, even, a bit kitschy.  The art world in the fifties had moved away from figurative imagery and Szukalski's problematic, heroically sized sculptures were more like examples of art featured on the covers of pulp magazines like Amazing Stories than the abstract high-culture abstractions favored at that time.  There were probably other reasons for Szukalski's eclipse -- notably, the man was insufferably arrogant, opinionated, and, later in his life, crazy.  The film posits a journey of discovery -- a man finds a strange out-of-print book in the surrealist section of an LA bookstore.  He is smitten by the peculiar art objects on shown in the book.  He runs into a friend of a friend who advises him that the legendary artist, now wholly forgotten, lives somewhere in the San Fernando valley.  The man, with his attractive girlfriend, goes to Szukalski's house, meeting him, and becomes a protegee -- it's like Michelangelo becoming a father figure to a blonde California surfer and his zaftig girlfriend.  The man, Glenn Bray, is a collector of Mad Magazine comics and draws pornography for underground comix.  Gradually other enthusiasts gather at the old man's house where he pontificates ad nauseum about his peculiar beliefs.  As the surfer dudes and underground comix artists gather in Szukalski's little bungalow, they come to learn about his history and Stac's ("Stash" as he is called by his buddies) life and times are revealed and chronicled in the film.  What is Leonardo di Caprio's role in all this?  His father George di Caprio drew underground comix and, so, became part of Stac's circle.  

The artist's story is bizarre and disturbing.  Born in Poland, the child moved with his family to Chicago when he was 12, I think about 1904.  The young man was a child prodigy.  He developed his own alphabet and wrote all his letters and memoirs in that script.  (Someone points that Stac was so intimidating and talented that no one ever sat him down and imposed any kind of discipline on the young man -- he was essentially feral, raised by parents who were afraid of him and who indulged his whims.)  He attended the Institute of Art in Chicago and showed great promise as a sculptor -- although he is also an excellent draftsman and graphic artist.  When his father, a blacksmith, was killed in a car crash, Stac persuaded a morgue attendant to let him dissect his father's corpse -- this causes Stac as an old man to say that "my father taught me anatomy."  I doubt a lot of what Stac tells his interviewers.  His accounts of his life are like those of Diego Rivera, a similarly exuberant and unreliable autobiographer -- Rivera claimed that he lived as a cannibal for several years in Mexico City (courtesy of a similarly accommodating morgue attendant), eating prime cuts from fresh corpses for his supper.  Stac married well, a doctor's daughter (this was after a short unhappy first marriage) and, then, immigrated back to Poland.  There he was immediately proclaimed Poland's greatest living artist and enjoyed prestigious commissions.  He traveled back and forth from Hollywood and Poland in the thirties, working on King Kong as a landscape artist.  His best friend from childhood was the great screenwriter Ben Hecht who wrote admiringly about Stac in his autobiography.  Stac was in Warsaw when Hitler bombed the city, killing 25,000 people.  Stac and his wife, who were American citizens, fled Europe with just two suitcases -- all of his elaborate commissions and paintings made in Poland were destroyed.  In the United States, he worked in various graphic arts capacities but never regained his pre-war fame -- he had been front page material in Chicago before the war but now was mostly forgotten.  Bray and his friends discovered the old man when he was 80, living with his wife, in a little cottage full of plaster-of-paris models of his works.  The California underground artists recorded hundreds of hours of interviews and lectures that the handsome old man delivered..  Stac died at 93 and his ashes were scattered on Easter Island.  Some of his friends raise funds to create a bronze figure named "Struggle" -- it seems to show an open hand with fingers represented by violently struggling snakes with the heads of birds of prey..  Another art work named for the Katyn Wood massacre in which the Russians wiped out the Polish intelligentsia, slaughtering professors, lawyers, artists and writers by the thousands, is shown as the old man's last work -- the sculpture shows an extravagantly horrible monster killing a heroically proportioned fighter.  Stac was wonderfully handsome, albeit in a miniature and androgynous way (he was five feet tall) -- with his aquiline good looks and pale skin, seemingly entirely without whiskers, he was a beautiful ephebe.  It is puzzling that he has been so thoroughly forgotten.

But documentaries of this sort are designed to be divided into four distinct chapters.  Chapter One is the "journey of discovery," recounting how the people producing the film stumbled onto the subject.  Chapter Two is a chronological presentation of the evidence, generally provided from a single adulatory perspective and without complication.  Chapter Three is the complicating material that renders the subject matter problematic and, even, disturbing.  The Fourth Chapter is denouement -- usually the death of the film's protagonist and some assessment as to his or her legacy.  The complicating chapter in Struggle is a doozy.  In Poland, Stac's work acquired political significance and his megalomania developed in a sinister direction.  Stac's sculptures had strongly nationalistic subject matter and the sculptor's interest in Pre-Columbian Mexican art and artifacts made by so-called primitive tribal people led him into Right wing and quasi-fascist ideology.  Stac was instrumental in publishing a magazine called Krac, described as a hyper-nationalistic, pro-Polish publication, roughly equivalent it seems to periodicals like Der Stuermer in Germany.  Krac's cover was emblazoned with a scary-looking double-headed axe and some of the rag's content was anti-Semitic.  Stac describes streetfighting in Poland between ultra-Nationalists and Communists.  The work that he designed during this period for public buildings and monuments is virtually indistinguishable from the sorts of art produced by state-sanctioned Nazi artists.  Stac's flirtation with tribal nationalism, more or less, ended with the Second World War.  But not really.  After the war, Stac devoted himself to the study of cultural symbolism, a creed that he called Zermatism.  This ideology asserts that all culture derives from Easter Island and involves a primordial battle between the pure, civilized races originating in the south Pacific and the "sons of Yeti", that is, the "Yetisyny".  This means what it sounds like.  Stac argues that Yetis (or gorilla monsters) raped the most beautiful women in the ancient world and begot degenerate children with them.  These degenerate ape-human mongrels are the source of all the misery, crime, and war in the world.  It's an insane system developed over 42 hand-bound volumes comprising 25,000 pages and 14,000 beautifully executed sketches and drawings illustrating the thesis by comparing different sorts of tribal art.  It seems that most of Szulkalski's interaction with his young acolytes involved his lectures on this topic.  And it's for this reason that the film ends in the early nineties with Stash's disciples scattering his ashes on Easter Island.  (The artist died in 1987 when he was 94.)

All of this begs the question of whether Szukalski's art is any good.  It is certainly odd-looking.  His sculptures involve grandiose battles between monstrous figures embossed with elaborate bas relief, tentacles twining around the massive, heavily muscled warriors and maidens.  Spectacular headdresses and armor relate back to Aztec and Mayan sculptures although the artist's approach to this material is more like the elaborate detailing on "low rider" muscle cars that you might find in places like the barrios in Albuquerque than the ancient artifacts that he uses as models.  Many of Szukalski's creatures wear weird goggles and seem like outer space aliens.  The film doesn't have confidence that this work is any good.  Therefore, we can't really see what the artist has wrought -- the camera glides over bronze surfaces, sliding through polished crevasses and fissures, too close for us to really see the form that the sculptor has made.  The more elaborate pieces are so heavily entangled with claws and limbs and rending beaks that they can't really be deciphered, a difficulty that is exacerbated by the intricate reliefs and medallions studding the figures.  The objects look a bit like H. R. Giger's monsters, for instance, the creature in the Alien movies, but endowed with the musculature of figures from renaissance sculpture, all this combined with bizarre, grisly-looking elements from Pre-Columbian art.  The commentators featured by the film are mostly comic book artists and tattoo specialists -- no respectable art critics appear in the film. (Timothy Snyder's appearance is a puzzle and I note the biographical entries about writer don't list this film as a credit.)  I assume the extreme subject matter and also the fascist implications of some of the images have scared away more conventional art historians and scholars.  It's hard to evaluate this work because the film is shot so that we can scarcely see it.  Stac's drawings and paintings are a varied lot, all of them executed in a fantastically accomplished, virtuosic style -- but, again, the subject matter is brutal, weird, closer the Frank Frazetta than Picasso or Matisse.  (At one point, someone tried to mount an exhibition of Szukalski's work at the Norton Simon museum among the fountains and orange trees in Pasadena.  Stac was ushered into the museum and told the curator that he didn't want his work displayed among the "excremental daubs" by Picasso, Klee, and others -- "they are," he announced, "fartists."   Of course, he was quickly ushered out of museum.  Leonardo di Caprio sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Laguna Beach Art Museum in 2000.)

The Castle

 I dozed off during the first half-hour of Alexsey Balabanov's The Castle (1994).  When some loud noise on my TV screen roused me, I stopped the picture and scrolled backward to the last scene that I dimly recalled prior to falling asleep.  I watched the intervening sequences, maybe about six or seven minutes of the 109 minute movie.  But this didn't correct the problems that I was experiencing deciphering the frenetic action on screen.  Throughout the rest of the film, I had the sense that I was missing some particularly salient and dispositive plot point that, if seen and appreciated, would clarify the film's narrative.  Ultimately, I concluded that the missing information simply didn't exist and that, perhaps, faithful to Kafka's incomplete source novel, the fundamental pivot on which the story turns is excluded,therefy giving the events portrayed a strangely hapless and orphaned aspect.  In Balabanov's movie,  a vast number of things occur but it's impossible to really make any sense of these events.  Motivations are perverse or obscure and what we see suggests some larger story that remains occult.

The Castle is a very handsome film, full of grinning, simpering grotesques.  The people are pale to the point of looking like wraiths and they have peculiar physiognomies -- the only really normal-looking character in the movie is the Land Surveyor, a kid with reddish blonde hair who looks a little like Opie in the old Andy Griffith show.  Because of his tousle-headed good looks, the Land Surveyor is much in demand by the ladies in the peculiar garrison-village located beneath the castle.  I'm always surprised by the amount of sex in Kafka's novels.  The writer's heroes are continuously seduced by barmaids and the desperate daughters of small-time bureaucrats who offer sex in closets and under tables -- these women's lascivious advances are seemingly condoned by everyone in the community, although other female rivals for the Land Surveyor's  affections are conniving and dismissive of their competitors and seek to displace them in his affections.  (The women behave with baffling promiscuity but, whenever, someone criticizes them for this conduct, they retreat into prudish, hypocritical propriety.)  Essentially, the story of The Castle, to the extent that I can make it out, involves a series of sexual encounters resulting in farcical consequences:  much peeping through keyholes, half-naked people running down corridors or diving into snowbanks, doors being opened so suddenly that eavesdroppers are not merely knocked over, but in one case hurled off a balcony down to the floor fifteen feet below.  All of this occurs within several big structures made of huge ashlars like the outbuildings of an old 17th century fortress.  One of these structures is a tavern and inn, another seems to be sort of public bath (a banya) and, finally, near the end of the movie, the hero reaches a strange castle, in fact, a keep that is a high tower in the woods -- but this is not the castle sought by the Land Surveyor;  rather, it's the chateau of low-level, if pompous, bureaucrat who likes to go hunting.  Exterior shots show snowy landscapes, drifted knee-deep, and enormous angular ramparts that seem to run for hundreds of yards.  The place seems to be some kind of bastion erected by Catherine the Great or one of the other old Tsars and it consists of huge, sheer walls.  (These walls remind us of the Great Wall of China, one of the touchstones in Kafka's imagination, an immense obstacle that everyone is duty-bound to guard for obscure reasons, a vast fortifications defending an Emperor who may or may not exist.)  Everything about the movie is, more or less, admirable -- it has a vigorous, commedia dell' arte exuberance and there is something interesting in every shot.  But the whole enterprise is lifeless, inert, and disheartening.  The frenzied slapstick activity on screen has a macabre, marionette-theater aspect and, ultimately, the movie is so formless as to be very tedious.

So far as I could decipher the action, the Land Surveyor arrives alone at an Inn somewhere remote from a big shadowy castle.  (The castle is seen only in dream sequences as a black silhouette hovering over a high  jagged wall.  Beneath the wall, there is a frothing puddle of what looks like whipped-cream in which, toward the end of the movie, a big, haggard crow writhes -- "Kavka" is the Czech word for "crow.")  The industry in this village seems to have something to do with producing cylinders from which music is played when they are mounted in sound systems -- the cylinders seem to operate on the model of a player piano.  When the cylinders are played, people either sing rather tunelessly or dance on a small illumined stage, alternately choruses of black clad rather rabbinical-looking men or black clad floozies who kick up their legs and wiggle their rumps as if doing the can-can.  The communal room is lit by a round gas-fired chandelier which makes a continuous hissing and sputtering sound. The film's soundtrack consists of weird buzzings and humming noises, low rumbles, screams sounding in the remote distance, and grim puppet theater waltzes and polkas.  (If you shut your eyes, the film sounds like a David Lynch movie -- some of the mise-en-scene resembles Lynch but I think the more immediate influence is the great Russian director, Alexei German, a film-maker who was heavily influenced by Fellini and, indeed, features in his films goblin-like faces and violent action far more extreme than anything attempted by the Italian.)   The Land Surveyor is, at first, accorded great respect, but also his pleas to meet the Castellan who has retained him are ignored.  As it turns out, there are a series of Castellans and sub-Castellans in hierarchical orders and the Land Surveyor is only granted access to the bottom-most agents in this inscrutable bureaucracy.  As I have observed, the story involves a series of sexual encounters with women whom the Land Surveyors hopes can promote his introduction at the Castle.  The women are the mistresses of penny-ante officials with access to the castle and, so, the Land Surveyor hopes that they will smooth the way for him to be admitted to that place, but, of course, these affairs just entangle the hero in various complications and lead nowhere.  In fact, the husbands and boyfriends of these women encourage the Land Surveyor's intercourse with their women in hopes, it seems, the Surveyor will, somehow, be able to promote their careers -- at least, this is how I interpreted the peculiar nonchalance with which these officials respond to their women sleeping with the Land Surveyor.  I wrote several pages of notes as to the film's plot but can't decipher them.  There are a variety of named figures:  Frieda (the Surveyor's first girlfiend), Brunswick and his pale, half-comatose wife, Klamm, Barnabas, Pepi, a sinister school-master with a jaw that seems to be about a yard long and so on. But I wasn't able to decipher how they are related, although all of them seem to have something to do with supplying music-imprinted cylinders for the castle.  (The plot suggests that there are a vast number of other cottage industries associated with the Castle that may have their own hierarchies, snow-bound villages, and sexually voracious women -- for instance, maybe, on the other side of the Castle, there's a village devoted to supplying dairy products to the castle with its own equivalent set of characters.)  In the end, the Surveyor, whose services no one really wants, seduces Mrs. Brunswick in the hope that she can assist him in his quest.  As soon as he succeeds in this endeavor. Brunswick claims to be the Land Surveyor and forces the real Surveyor to assume his identity as the husband of Mrs. Brunswick.  It's not clear that Brunswick will prosper in this role, but it is certain that this change of identity signifies a disaster for the hero.  The final scene shows us a little boy, who recognizes the Land Surveyor and acknowledges his identity -- everyone else seems completely happy with the transformation of Brunswick into the Surveyor and vice-versa.  In fact, no one even seems to care.  The camera tilts up to show the strange suspended ring of fire and film fades out.  

The picture is replete with spectacularly ugly faces and uncanny gestures.  The Land Surveyor is given two assistants from the Castle who seem to be morons --  they grin and simper and are completely useless, that is, until one of them is shown in bed with one of the Surveyor's mistresses and, suddenly becomes, a ruthless and powerful figure who threatens his boss with a a beating.  Many scenes feature the Surveyor in bed with various people, including a strange scene in which the Surveyor lolls on the pillows next to an enormous bureaucrat.  There's a tall stone house with a door midway up the side accessed by the kind of  deadly-looking rock steps of the kind you see on a Mexican pyramid -- those steps are scary enough in the tropics let alone in this film in which they are always shown to be slick with snow and ice.  Characters whinny and prance like horses.  Old men and women sprawl in bathtubs that look like beer kegs.  Everyone is constantly darting about, shouting invective, tripping and falling in the snow.  But I couldn't keep the characters straight and was never able to figure out how they are related to one another.  It's a spectacular film in many ways but exceptionally rebarbative -- I  took notes and. still, couldn't figure the thing out and so I expect a casual viewer would be completely defeated by this picture.  What's disturbing to me is that I can't ascertain whether I have failed the film or it has failed me.