Tar

 I don't have the know-how to type the name of Todd Field's 2022 film Tar correctly.  In the film's title, the word is adorned with an elegant slash of diacritical mark above the vowel.  This mark, however, is an affectation, an irritating and pretentious mystification that seems to correlate with no known language.  In the movie, people pronounce the name just like the word for a common black and sticky substance.  "Tar" with its ornamental diacritical mark above the "a" is simply an trademark, an exotic sign that tells us that the protagonist in Field's movie has set herself apart from the common herd -- she's a rara avis, a self-defined anomaly:  a female orchestral conductor, a self-made man (the gender is used intentionally), someone who has converted her love for classical music into something strange and sinister, the ruthless exercise of will to power.  Field's movie establishes Lydia Tar as a sacred monster, a genius who is also as villainous within her hermetic and claustrophobic world as Richard III and the movie, of course, has only one direction that it can take this material -- the film is a tragedy, classically imagined, that is, the fall of a noble and gifted person due to their overweening pride.  

Tar is enormously long (two hours and 47 minutes) and its loquacious script is exceedingly subtle and intricate with nuance.  But the general arc of the narrative is simple enough.  With a few exceptions, Tar has established her grip on the classical music world on the basis of steely intelligence, unremitting hard work, and fear.  She is liked, as the saying goes, but not well-liked.  And, over the course, of the movie, we see her burning one bridge after another until, at the end, there is no one left to support, or, even, advise or commiserate with her.  The film is tough-minded enough to show that Tar is resourceful and, even in the abyss of professional disgrace, undaunted -- and, although there's no trace of this outcome in the plot displayed in the movie, it's pretty apparent that Tar is not defeated at the end, but merely exiled to plan her comeback.  Tar, the movie, is fairly schematic, although enigmatic and puzzling throughout -- there are a number of scenes that I have difficulty interpreting and eerie, peculiar details.  (Tar's stepdaughter, Petra, has to have her foot held at night or she can't sleep and there's a scene in a brothel so grotesque and bizarre that we are reminded, as if the film's style would let us forget, that the director Todd Fields most notably first appeared in films as a perverse character in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.  Tar is full of gruesome-looking subterranean passages, haunted autumnal woods, and demon-possessed metronomes -- as with Eyes Wide Shut which Tar's tone resembles, the movie is, in part, a grim horror film.)  The movie introduces Tar is the simplest, most direct, and economically formulaic way:  Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker, playing Adam Gopnik, introduces Tar at a symposium, apparently an art's festival presented by his magazine and he literally provides us with the conductor's curriculum vitae. Incidentally, this introduction explains an odd detail in the opening of the film.  For some reason, Fields puts the lengthy technical credits to the movie at the very beginning of the film while we hear a rather ghostly, lilting melody sung in an unknown language in a high-pitched voice.  Gopnik's introduction tells us that Tar collected folk songs among the Peruvian Indians and this, we retrospectively conclude, is the source of the melody underlying the opening titles.  (This technique occurs repeatedly in the movie; we are shown a detail but only understand the significance of that image or dialogue later in the picture -- the effect is that the viewer gropes his or her way through the movie.) Gopnik says that Tar is the director of the Berlin Philharmonic, is promoting a book called Tar on Tar, and is working hard to complete her cycle of Mahler symphonies, recording the Fifth symphony by that composer with the orchestra in Berlin, where she lives and maintains a home with her wife, the concertmistress of the philharmonic, and, another apartment in a spooky building where she composes and works on her writing.  We are told that Tar is an acolyte of Leonard Bernstein -- he was her mentor -- and that her perspective on the Mahler symphonies differs from Bernstein because she is somehow focused on the relationship between Mahler and his wife, Alma; she proclaims that the symphony is about love.  Tar has formed a non-profit enterprise called Accordion to encourage young women to become orchestral conductors -- she has just opened the curriculum to men as well.  (The concept of the accordion will re-appear late in the movie as abject evidence of Tar's humiliation).  Tar is fierce in all respects.  When her wife's daughter, Petra, whom Tar seems to genuinely love, is bullied at school, she goes to the academy, announcing that she is Petra's "father", and, then, makes a blood-curdling threat to the little girl who is tormenting the child.  Tar boxes ferociously and runs distance through the woods.  In one scene, in which she is upset, she conducts the Berlin orchestra as if engaged in a karate duel with an invisible adversary.  At the climax of the film, she puts her boxing skills to good effect and literally beats a conductor whom she suspects has stolen her "performance score" of the Mahler Fifth -- an assault for which we are prepared by an early scene in which the other conductor, a rather feckless weak man, begs for her to let him read her annotations on the Mahler score.  (Fields' direction is so precise and skillful that in a number of scenes, in which the performance score is notably missing from Tar's bookshelf, we see the gap in the bound scores as an ominous fissure, a sign of something very bad about to occur.)  

The main strands in the plot involve several simultaneously occurring misfortunes.  Tar has seduced a young woman named Krista and, then, when the relationship ended (Krista was apparently stalking her) ghosted her former protegee.  Krista commits suicides and emails are discovered (or, at least, not deleted by Tar's longsuffering assistant, Francesca) and this implicate the conductor in the woman's death.  A lawsuit ensues and Tar has to give a deposition.  Francesca, who has been a lover, ultimately abandons Tar, leaving her to her own devices.  An elderly conductor, the assistant, it seems, at the Berlin Philharmonic, has to be "rotated" out of his job with the orchestra -- he was apparently instrumental in Tar's achieving the role as artistic director and chief conductor of the orchestra, but now she is willing to betray him.  Tar is scheming to seduce a Russian cello-player and manipulates the situation into giving this young woman the part of the soloist in an Elgar cello sonata -- this is despite the fact that the logical candidate for that part would be the first-chair cello player with Berlin Philharmonic.  Other cello players with the Philharmonic refuse to audition for the role, but Tar has Olga, the Russian girl, seek the part -- even though she's not even on the payroll of the orchestra.  As it happens, Olga is as transactional and ruthless as Tar and it's not at all clear who is manipulating whom in this relationship.  An unfairly edited cell-phone video of Tar taunting a pansexual young man about identity politics surfaces and suggests that Tar is using Accordion as an enterprise to groom young musicians to be her lovers.  The board of directors at Accordion are appalled and Tar is further condemned for not advising them about the lawsuit arising from Krista's suicide.  Tar is effectively ousted from her own non-profit.  She is also ousted from the role of conducting Mahler's Fifth symphony for Deutsche Grammophon and, when another conductor is put at the podium, she violently assaults him.  Tar's wife, the concertmistress with the Berlin Philharmonic, kicks her out and severs Tar's only uncomplicated relationship, her role as Petra's protector.  (Tar's wife is not incensed about the woman's infidelity with the Russian cellist -- instead, she is enraged that Tar has not consulted with her or asked for her advice; after all, Tar's wife says, I helped you to worm your way into the Berlin Philharmonic and, so, why have you excluded me from these matters that are potentially disastrous to our family?)  In the midst of all these travails, Tar is insomniac, haunted by strange and disturbing visions, and physically deteriorating -- she has fallen and damaged her face after an encounter with some kind of monster in a subterranean passage full of dripping, drizzling water like a nightmare out of Tarkovsky.  Tar loses her position with the Berlin Philharmonic and it appears that critics have "canceled her" -- her book will probably not be well-reviewed.  But she travels to the Philippines and, in an utterly bizarre and grotesque, final sequences struggles to reinvent herself.  The final shot pans across an audience that is made up of nothing but monsters.

The movie is replete with curious and startling details.  An old German conductor equates "denazification" with being canceled for sexual impropriety.  Tar can't tolerate being called Maestra because it draws attention to her femininity -- but, nonetheless, everyone uses that honorific with her.  In one peculiar and haunting scene, Tar goes back to her childhood home, an empty decaying house in a place that looks like Allentown, Pennsylvania -- she sees her brother, who calls her "Linda".  Tar denounces her enemies repeatedly as "robots" but she behaves as if programmed mechanically herself.  There is lots of inside "baseball" in the movie:  you have to know that M.T.T. means Michael Tilson Thomas; D.G. means Deutsche Grammophon.  In one startling scene, in which Tar taunts the bi-sexual conducting student, she hunches over the piano playing a Bach Brandenburg sonata, imitating the unique posture and gestures of Glenn Gould.  There are remarkable sequences, mostly in pidgin German, in which Tar rehearses the Philharmonic and demonstrates her perfectionism and genius.  Fields, who wrote the script, luxuriates in tiny, telling details:  in one scene, Tar lunches with Olga and suggests that the Russian have a "cucumber salad" -- instead, Olga orders a veal cutlet with fried potatoes (while Tar has the cucumbers) which she eats ravenously.  This little sequence tells you pretty much all that you need to know about the balance of power in Tar's relationship with her new lover and protegee.  After an old woman in the apartment above her flat dies, the family of the dead woman come to Tar's door and say that they can hear her practicing in her rooms.  Assuming this is a compliment, Tar thanks them.  But the family says that they are trying to sell the apartment and that they would appreciate it if she would avoid "making noise" when the realtor is showing the place. One man's music is another man's noise.  

Field shoots with movie with impeccable taste and logic.  He masterfully uses a very wide-screen format.  The picture is devised around extremely long takes and resembles Kubrick for most of its length.  Kubrick was more relentlessly symmetrical in his compositions; Fields is much more relaxed but, equally, precise and perfectionist.  The sound engineering is a marvel of eerie noises, sudden bursts of orchestral music, and people screaming faintly in the dark.  The sound is hyper-directional and, on the big screen, comes at you from all angles.  The dialogue is fantastically sophisticated and allusive.  It is worth considering how this movie would be regarded if its protagonist were male -- the genius of the picture is to address issues as to cancel-culture and sexual harassment using a powerful woman as a villain.  This clarifies issues as the privileges of genius but, also, makes these problems more luminously dark and obscure as well.  Cate Blanchet, who plays Tar, will be nominated for every possible award for her performance and deservedly so -- but the picture is too dauntingly intellectual to reach a large audience.  That said, Tar is one of the best movies I have seen in past couple years.      

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

 Tom Gormicon's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent( 2021) is a film that foregrounds characteristics of Nick Cage's acting that have previously been incidental to the movies in which he stars.  Cage often overacts and his performances are so bizarrely expressive that they subvert the films in which he is featured.  For Cage, every line is articulated as a moment of desperate decision, an instance of visionary revelation with words spoken as if pivoting around a narrative climax.  In many of Cage's movies, the actor seems to regard each utterance as a central and climactic moment in the narrative.  These aspects of Cage's persona, more or less incidental to the various action films in which the star has performed (and evident in early pictures like Moonstruck and Peggy Sue Got Married), are made the entire subject of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent until the film devolves into a typical Nick Cage action movie.  For this reason, the picture is about 2/3rd sly, well-scripted, and very funny -- the last third of the movie involves car chases, gun-battles and explosives and seems, oddly enough, tame compared to the preceding narrative.  

Cage plays himself in the film, an actor eager to make a big Hollywood come-back although he denies this very premise:  "I was never away," he persuades himself.  The two aspects of Cage's stage and film persona appear in the movie as a Hollywood star who has seen better days and may be in decline, played with Cage's characteristic hang-dog charm and self-effacing gloom and the actor's younger self, Nicky, a brash insouscient young buck who literally bitch-slaps himself as an older (and wiser) man.  Nicky personifies Cage's wild man schtick and he's equally an embarrassment and a inspiration to his older self.  The film's set-up is nothing if not formulaic -- in fact, the plot is inspired, it seems, by Bruce Willis' role in Die Hard:  a middle-aged man is estranged from his ex-wife and daughter and has to earn their respect in a fiery and violent ordeal at the climax of the movie.  This is stupid, retrograde stuff and tolerable only because for most of its length the movie refuses to take these narrative cliches seriously.  

Cage's daughter Addy is disgusted with him because he keeps imposing his rather outre taste in film on her -- he loves a hundred-year old picture that his daughter calls The Cabinet of Dr. Calamari (presumably for its exaggerated expressionist acting); the picture bores the 16-year old girl to tears.  At her birthday party, Cage gets drunk, sings an improvised bit of doggerel dedicated to her, and embarrasses his daughter.  Cage has just been turned-down for a role in which he thought he could make a come-back (not that he's ever been gone), is living at the Sunset Tower where he owes $600,000, and feels that he's washed-up.  His agent, Fink (played by Neil Patrick Harris) sets him up with a gig at Mallorca, an appearance at birthday party for which he's supposed to be paid a million dollars.  As it happens, the Spanish olive oil prince seems to be a gangster, the leader of an international cartel of arm's smugglers.  When Cage turns up in Mallorca, two CIA agents recruit him to infiltrate the criminal organization and provide intelligence to the U.S. government.  Cage is skeptical at first, but enjoys the fact that he's doing something of real significance.  He gains the trust of the criminal, a man who is a fanatic about Cage's acting, and the two of them collaborate on a script.  The script is supposed to be "a beautiful character-driven movie for adults" described by Cage to the enthusiastic gangster as "Cassavetes meets Inarritu with a touch of Von Trier."  This part of the film is meandering, nicely eccentric, and, in fact, a nice character-driven picture for adults.  But Cage's CIA handlers need him to remain in the gangster's compound long enough to solve a kidnapping -- the daughter of the Catalonian president has been kidnapped by the gangster.  So, Cage is led to tell the gangster that the movie needs more box-office oomph, that is, some car chases and gun fights, and, therefore, they should introduce a kidnapping plot into the pictures.  (Obviously, the movie under consideration is the film that we are watching.)  The gangster, hoping to help Cage artistically, flies his ex-wife and daughter to Mallorca, ostensibly so that family issues troubling the actor can be resolved.  But the ex-wife and Addy, the 16-year-old daughter, are kidnapped by the bad guys and this leads to a standard action-film climax with lots of car chases through the narrow roads on the Mallorcan coast as well as gun-battles, explosions, and the like.  None of this is particularly interesting and the action sequences are staged in a perfunctory manner.  The CIA orders Cage to kill the gangster who has now become his best friend; the gangster also decides that he has to murder cage.  There's an unsatisfying plot twist that resolves this conundrum and, as we used to say in the seventies, represents a "cop-out" from the "adult" problem of mixed loyalties posed by the narrative.  The movie ends happily with Cage and ex-wife along with Addie, reconciled, the movie made with the gangster a great popular success, and the three principals blissfully watching the gangster's favorite movie, Paddington 2.  

In the first two-thirds of the moviem there are many laugh-out-loud sequences.  Cage and the gangster drop acid and drive maniacally along the sea-coast.  They become paranoid and are stymied by an ancient wall that you can easily walk around but which they desperately try to scale.  Cage gets to over-act in various ways, including a slapstick sequence where he is half-paralyzed by some kind of drug intended for the bad guys.  There are many funny and smart lines, for instance, Cage praising his performance style as "nouveau shamanic acting."  The script on which he is working with the Spanish gangster is described as "involving dueling Christ figures."  All of this is very amusing until the action plot kicks in and wrecks the movie.  In the action sequences, the film seems to forget that Cage is just a Hollywood actor whose exploits on-screen are fictional and supported, as he says at one point, by "the stunt department."  This is unfortunate but the picture is clever enough and sufficiently witty to support a recommendation and the stuff that doesn't work, at the end of the picture, is jarring but not so bad as to annul the mild pleasures offered by the first, and best, part of the film.  (Mallorca is represented by the coast of Croatia and most of the movie seems to have been shot in Hungary.)

At the MIA: Botticelli and Renaissance Florence

 At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, n exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence features work by Sandro Botticelli, his immediate precursors, and followers.  The show hits the sweet spot in terms of scope and size:  it's large enough to be satisfying and informative but not so expansive as to exhaust visitors.  You can look at each object and read accompanying (and helpful) wall labels in about an hour's time.  The exhibition displays classical Roman-era statuary (1st century BC replicas of Greek works) that correlate to the themes and postures of the figures painted by Botticelli and his associates.  This aspect of the show is interesting but, in my estimation, the connection between the paintings and the sculptures is, often, remote -- nonetheless, the Roman sculpture (some of it battered but much in mint condition) provides the viewer with a sense of the classical ambience in Florence, a whiff of the air breathed by Botticelli and others when they made the works in the show (generally between about 1450 and 1480).  The statues show us what the renaissance artists imagined as beautiful and how they worked within that tradition.  

I counted five paintings by Botticelli in the show.  There are probably a total of about 20 to 25 paintings on display.  The Botticelli works are strange, with odd details and, sometimes, peculiar deficiencies, idiosyncrasies of perspective or proportion that are hard to interpret:  are these anomalies simply mistakes or are they intended to be expressive? One of the iconic works in the show is Botticelli's painting of the maiden Pallas with a hirsute centaur.  Pallas is implacable with an inexpressive, if perfectly symmetrical face; her indifferent angelic features contrast with her voluptuous body, scarcely concealed by a diaphanous fabric marked with a floral pattern.  The garment leaves nothing to the imagination and seems similar to the translucent drapery wrapped around figures in Botticelli's famous "Primavera".  The maiden has seized the hair on the centaur's head and has twisted the creature's neck into a weirdly contorted posture.  The centaur is obviously distressed and his face depicts anguish that is ambiguously either physical (discomfort at having his hair pulled) or spiritual or both.  There's a luminous blue-grey landscape bathed in moisture and the figures stand on a tapestried meadow with flowers and spring-like coiled grass that looks like an embroidered carpet.  (This sort of floral medieval carpeting under the feet of the figures is ubiquitous in the show.)  The centaur's head is too large and seems half detached from his muscular body -- the effect is that someone has collaged a head onto the painting that doesn't exactly fit with the rest of the image.  Is this unnatural treatment of the centaur's head intended to highlight graphically some point or is it just a mistake in the way the painting was produced?  It's impossible to tell decide this question.  Similar issues arise with Botticelli's painting of the Virgin Mary introducing Jesus to an infant John the Baptist.  Again the heads seem too large and the baby Jesus, painted to prefigure his deposition from the cross, wriggles down to embrace the stolid little John the Baptist, twisting into a python-like posture that is completely unnatural and implausible.  Presumably, the effect arises because Botticelli wants to conflate Jesus' infancy with his death and the twisting child is both a squirming infant and a mangled corpse.  But in visual terms, the painting, although sumptuous and brilliant, is a little grotesque.  (In other pictures, Botticelli and his compatriots have not figured out how to represent a prone infant -- their solution is to give the child a contrapossta posture but have him float, seeming unsupported over the hay of the manger.)  My favorite Botticelli in the show is a small painting of St. Augustine laboring over his writing.  The Saint is ensconced in a sort of gloomy barrel-shaped vault and seated at a desk.  The perspective on the desk is botched.  The supports for the desk are seemingly behind the plane of the Saint's knees and it seems improbable that an actual writing table in this form could possible remain upright.  Again, the effect is to push the Saint forward so that he stands out in statuesque three dimensions but the impression on the viewer is disquieting.  Some serpentine twists of paper, rejected drafts, lie on the floor in front of the writing desk -- this is a charming, but, again, somewhat disquieting detail.  A curtain to the right side of the painting dangles down, a purely gratuitous if effectively designed bit of drapery -- the underside of the grey-blue drapery is salmon-pink, providing an eerie, flame-like highlight of color to the otherwise muted tones of the picture.  In the last of the four galleries, a large nativity scene shows all of the rich and famous grandees in Florence, chief among them a flock of Medici princes, saluting the infant Christ.  The picture is either intentionally or unintentionally comic:  the Florentine male elite portrayed so fulsomely in the picture are unambiguously haughty, even arrogant, heads thrown back and chests expanded and they are dressed in their most elaborate regalia.  But this solemn crowd of dignitaries has come to kneel one by one to Christ, painted here as a rather chubby and aggressive-looking infant.  Botticelli, apparently, poses here as well in a self-portrait -- he looks out of the painting in an insinuating manner, as if pleased with the contrast he has made between the well-dressed conclave and the occasion of kneeling before a rather mundane-looking infant.  Botticelli is handsome, with a commanding ironic expression -- he will look like someone you know quite well, but whose name you can't quite place.  

Possibly the best painting in the exhibit is a tondo showing the Virgin Mary with Jesus attended by a ethereally beautiful angels with lustrous wings.  This painting is by someone named Frenieso Botticini and it is very beautiful -- particularly admirable are the details of small wren-like songbirds prancing around the edges of a glamorous-looking enclosed garden (the garden walls are entwined with roses); two handsome lizards adorn one of the paving stones and the angels have blank expressions that can be interpreted either as a sort of disinterest or, perhaps, as being preternaturally smug.  It's a glorious picture and more competently made than the Botticelli's in the show.  (The pert songbirds rhyme with a Roman cinerary urn replete with garlands and ram's heads -- some little birds are pecking for seeds or insects along the bottom of alabaster box.)  Next to Laocoon-like sculpture of satyrs entangled with vipers, there's a small painting of a young man shown in two respective postures -- first, he encounters a serpent and, then, we see him writing on the tapestried grass with the serpent wrapped around his body.  A banner of letters provides the moral, something about having an enemy in the family being worse than an attack by vipers.  The picture has a lovely, smoky blur about it -- an example of the impressionistic sfumato effect that characterizes some of Leonardo da Vinci's works.  There's a big lush nude, a life-size image of Venus, not by Botticelli in the first gallery.  The lighting in that gallery creates blinding highlights on the upper surfaces of the pictures and so the nude's features (and the face of Pallas in the painting with centaur) are sometimes illegible because of they way the pictures are hung. (The paintings have a smooth, enamel cloissone-like surface -- you can't see any trace of brushwork.) Some smaller objects are noteworthy -- there's a charcoal sketch of angel's face that Swinburne believed to be the most beautiful portrait in the world (it's elegantly ethereal and perfect to the point of being hard to see -- no one has ever seen a face so wonderful in the real world so the effect is a little alienating.)  There's an etching of Botticelli's sinuous designs for an edition of Dante's Divine Comedy -- again a cool, almost mathematical rendering of lurid material that completely softens the effect of Dante's invective and grotesque description.  Because Virgil is shown in the image, the curators have included a funny woodcut showing medieval legends of Virgil as a sorcerer.  A courtesan has lured Virgil to her rooms by lifting him from the street in a wicker basket.  To punish Virgil for some slight, she left him suspended in mid-air to be gawked-at by onlookers.  (He seems to be sitting in an aerial bathtub.)  Virgil responded by magically putting out all the fires in Rome and, then, leaving a single burning ember in the woman's vagina -- in the the picture, a dozen people with long rods are lighting their tips from the unfortunate woman's crotch.  To remind us that this is happening in Rome the unknown artist has put the Colosseum in the center of the woodcut with little figures peeping out of its colonnade.  (I saw the show on Wednesday morning using a timed ticket to enter at 11:30 -- each of the four galleries had about a dozen or so people looking at the art; this was manageable -- when a spot in front of one art object opened, I took that place and so could comfortably examine each thing in the show.  In any event, it's better than the Uffizi in Florence -- I recall that place as horrifyingly crowded, hot, and uncomfortable.)

Also on display is a large exhibit of landscapes by Teo Nguyen, a suite of pictures called the "Vietnam Peace Project".  These are greyish acrylics, some with delicate calligraphic grass painted as blonde strokes in the foreground.  Many of the pictures show locations of famous atrocities that occurred during the war, however, stripped of the presence of soldiers or suffering peasants.  One street scene shows the place where a South Vietnamese general shot a Communist infiltrator to death -- we see the crossroads, the buildings, but the figures that made the place briefly famous are no longer in evidence.  Several landscapes show ominous-looking roads but without people.  The most disturbing of these pictures shows an asphalt highway under a lowering sky with signs to the right of the road -- this is the lane over which Kim Phuc fled as a little girl with half of her skin burned-off by a napalm strike, one of the iconic images of the war.  These pictures are a little foggy and look like some of Gerhardt Richter's paintings imitating snapshots (or his sequence of pictures on the killings of the Baader-Meinhof gang members) -- the pictures are better than they look and the show is worth studying.  However, you walk into Nguyen's exhibit after touring the Botticelli exhibit and the contrast between the colorful Renaissance paintings, and, particularly, the last gallery, with its beautifully individualized portraits is problematic and the Vietnamese artist's subtle images don't really register -- you can't really see Nguyen's big canvases after looking hard at the enameled and colorful surfaces of the Florentine renaissance pictures.  

There's a show of photographs by Marcia Resnick.  These are interesting and, also, better than they look.  The pictures show various downtown New York celebrities in the early seventies -- for instance, Susan Sontag and John Belushi.  There's an amusing series of Rueckenfiguren (figures shot from the back) surveying various southwestern landscapes -- the picture series called "See" registers as a series of buttocks.  German engravings made during the time of Duerer are on display.  Some pretty rare images by Israhel von Meckanem are on display including a funny print of an unhappy married couple and a completely bizarre image of two "wild men" in shaggy armor jousting -- the one wild knight has beets on his helmet; the other displays leeks.  Among the Native American objects, there's "belt cup" made from exquisitely carved wood -- the thing is what the name implies:  it's a wooden cup that you wear on your belt,  The handle of the cup is carved as a gorgeous volute or scroll like the top of a fiddle and there's a plump little beaver whittled into the convex curve of the cup.  This Huron-made object from about 1830 is wholly charming.  

Fall

Laser-focused and too plausible for comfort, Steve Mann's Fall (2022) is not exactly pleasurable viewing.  I found the film too frightening to be enjoyable and, in fact, regretted watching the picture, although I remained riveted to the screen.  I saw the movie on TV and can only imagine the disturbing effect the picture would have if viewed on a big screen in a darkened auditorium.  I paused the movie a few times so that I could go to the toilet and eat a banana and, for obvious reasons, the movie made me thirsty -- I found myself in the kitchen two or three times replenishing a glass of sparkling water that I was drinking.  Without breaks of this kind, I think the picture might have been intolerable.  And I will admit that the film disturbed my sleep -- I awoke several times trying to work out a solution to the perilous conundrum that the movie posed.  That said, my reaction may be idiosyncratic -- no less an eminence grise, Stephen King, the horror novelist, has said that Fall is the sort of story that he wished he had written:  it's concentrated and terrifying and, despite the immensity of some of its images, exceedingly claustrophobic, a bit like an open-air version of Poe's "Premature Burial" or the motifs of confinement in King's Misery or Gerald's Game with its heroine handcuffed to a bed for much of the film's duration. 

It's hard to explain the cumulative effect of Fall because much of the film is very predictable, featuring stock characters and very generic, even shallow, plot developments.  Clearly, the picture is a genre film and doesn't have any ambition to be more profound or significant than other suspense pictures of this sort.  The principal heroine is a plucky young woman, resourceful, but battling inner demons.  She has a kindly, concerned father who, ultimately, rushes to her rescue.  The heroine, Becky, has a spunky best friend; people encountered in the Mojave desert where most of the film is set are predictably unkind and, even, vicious -- desert rats, as such folk might be called, rarely get a sympathetic portrayal in films.  We are confident that the heroine, who grew up watching professional wrestling, will confront her anxieties and emerge stronger from her ordeal.((At one point, she faces down a menacing turkey vulture with nothing more than an intense glare.)  All of this is exactly what one would expect from a movie of this sort.  What's unexpected is the really terrifying nature of the ordeal.

The film begins with Becky and her husband goofing around on sheer cliff about eight-hundred feet high while her best friend, Hunter is scampering up the rock face with incredible skill and boldness.  The sequence is filmed realistically and the heights are palpable.  Of course, the husband falls as he tries to clamp his harness into a small cave in which an eagle apparently is living -- the bird flies into his face and knocks him off the mountain.  (Later, in the film, the malevolent eagle will be replaced by equally nasty buzzards.)  51 weeks later, as a title informs us, Becky is still disabled by grief and drinking heavily.  Her father comes to assist her but she rebuffs him and, later, even considers suicide.  She is gobbling some pills when her best friend, Hunter calls her and suggests an adventure:  to honor the dead husband, whose ashes are reposing in a shabby cardboard box, Becky and Hunter will climb a TV tower in the Mojave Desert and scatter the cremains from the top of the slender metal rail standing tall in the sky above the desert -- the tower is 2000 feet tall and was once the tallest structure in North America; it's now abandoned and slated for demolition.

Becky is dubious about this enterprise but reluctantly agrees to venture into the desert with her friend.  Hunter is a you-tube celebrity who posts her adventures on line as "Dangerous D."  On the morning of the ascent, Hunter wears a push-up bra showing lots of cleavage:  tits for clicks, she says, advising that she needs to keep her viewers engaged in her intrepid feats.  The gate on the dirt track leading to the tower is locked shut, so the two young women hike a couple miles to the isolated tower, encountering along the way some turkey vultures eating a still-living donkey.  Dangerous D takes a video of the poor donkey and posts it, remarking "Survival of the Fittest".  Equipped with a rucksack with some water and a good "4 K"drone, the women climb the tower.  The tower is in bad shape, corroded and, as the women ascend on a rickety ladder within the triangular scaffolding of the structure, we see inserts of bolts popping loose and metal grating on metal -- the tower seems in imminent danger of collapse, a point made clear to us by images of guy-wires rattling free from the concrete pads on which they are inserted.  The tower is a character in the film, buffeted by winds and a sort of immense lightning rod.  It creaks and groans and is vertiginously high.  The details as to the tower's construction and physical characteristics are established in great, and convincing, detail.  (I have no idea how the movie was made and I assume it is chock-full of CGI, but the sequences on the tower are all exceptionally realistic and very effectively staged -- the movie puts the viewer on the tip of the TV tower, 2000 feet above the scuffed and scarred desert floor that looks like something seen from an airplane.)  The sense of dread looming over the climb is oppressive, furthered by the fact that the girls were almost hit by a semi-truck roaring by on the highway outside of the motel while they were distracted, peering up at the abstract metal line of the tower against the sky.  (The script is very well-designed -- the foreshadowing scene with the oblivious semi-truck that almost hits the heroine's pick-up rhymes with a later scene in which a truck on that same highway plays an important part in the story.)  At 1800 feet, the ladder ends and the women have to clamber up the exterior of the metal scaffolding, passing by some broadcasting equipment, lobes that hang off the tower like pendulous ears.  At the very top, there is a platform the size of a "large pizza" one of the women says, a circular metal landing that is forty feet below a blinking red beacon signaling the tower's presence to passing airplanes.  In several scenes that I experienced as literally sickening, the girls dangle off the edge of the platform and take selfies showing the fantastic height to which they have ascended.  Becky scatters the ashes and, then, the two women plan to descend.  The exterior ladder, however, breaks loose from the side of the tower and plunges 1800 feet to the desert, leaving both girls stranded on the platform.  This occurs at about the half-hour mark in the film which is 107 minutes long.  The rest of the movie details the women's desperate efforts to find a way down from the tower or to summon help -- their cell-phone don't work at the height of the platform.  There are some pointless interludes -- for instance, we learn that Hunter was sleeping with Becky's husband.  But, generally, the action on the tower seems plausible, the fearsome dilemma is obvious, and the women's efforts to escape from what seems to be increasingly lethal circumstances is all very intensely dramatized.  You may have heard the expression "white-knuckled suspense" -- that term applies to this film.  The girls spend three nights on the tower, become increasingly weak, and desperate, and suffer various horrible injuries -- Becky has her leg ripped open and wound becomes gangrenous, stinking so that vultures circle the tower's top and, ultimately, attack her.  Hunter tears open her hands and can't use them after engaging in some seemingly impossible aerial acrobatics -- the film is very clever with respect to Hunter's exploits; as it turns out what we see and experience as implausible is, in fact, impossible and there is a reason that Hunter's hands can't be used after she is injured.  I won't reveal this plot development but it is a brilliant way of assimilating what seems to be implausible to the general sense of realism in the picture.  (I'll give you a clue -- take a look at the movie Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's exploration of a similar situation; in fact, some of the terrifying sequences in Fall seem derived from Cuaron's picture.)  After a series of horrors, including Becky strangling a turkey vulture and eating it, the movie ends happily, but it's an ordeal to reach that conclusion.  

I thought Fall too brutal and horrific to be entertaining, but I have to salute the craft with which this movie was made, it's austere commitment to plausibility, and it's brilliant vertiginous action sequences.  This is the sort of movie in which you have to keep telling yourself:  It's only a movie, it's only a movie.    

 

The Stranger

 The Stranger is a 2020 film directed by the Australian Thomas M. Wright.  On the evidence of this picture (now available on Netflix), Wright is an excellent director with an unusual and uncompromising film technique.  He is the author of the script said to be based on "true events" -- the story told by the movie is chronicled in a book by Kate Kyriaco called The Sting.  In essence, the movie is a sort of police procedural, although set in a hellish void filled with sinister bureaucrats indistinguishable from the criminals that they are chasing.  The movie is a paranoid thriller and seems most closely similar to pictures made in the seventies in Hollywood by figures like Francis Coppola and Alan Pakula -- indeed, the icy cold veneer presented by the picture with its gloomy interiors and empty landscapes seems influenced by Francis Coppola's paranoid The Conversation.

The Stranger is shot in such a way as to conceal its plot, although after about twenty minutes, the viewer will begin to understand what is happening.  On first encounter, the picture seems to document a chance meeting on a airplane between two hirsute Australian gentlemen, both of them middle-aged.  The plane is mostly empty and very dark -- it's like a black tunnel to nowhere, the first sign that much of the imagery in the film will be heavily stylized and, even, abstract.  We see a strange conical mound, but there is nothing to signify scale and so we don't know if we are looking at a mountain or just a heap of pyramidal-shaped rubbish.  On landing, the two men becomes friends until, suddenly, and, in a disconcerting change of narrative direction, one of the guys, who has acted as a benefactor to the other stranger, a man named Henry, vanishes from the film -- this is after we have seen the friendly man mysteriously using dye to darken his hair.  (This makes Henry a little suspicious).  Henry has been introduced to a group of enigmatic criminals and invited to join them -- although the nature of the criminal enterprise is never really specified.  The men meet Henry in various hotels and indicate that they need to vet him before he can become a member of their gang.  The crook on the airplane is now replaced by a melancholy man named Mark Frame.  We see Frame with his son, a boy who seems to be about eleven -- Frame is distracted, a remote, absent father, although he seems to genuinely love his son.  There's no wife in evidence although, from time to time, she is mentioned -- apparently, Frame is divorced.

The film doesn't make much effort to conceal it's central conceit and so I'm not hesitant to reveal this plot twist here:  Frame (and the other crooks) are, in fact, undercover police officers.  Their objective is to lure Henry into confessing to a crime that he committed eight years previous -- the abduction and apparent murder of a little boy named James Liston, apparently a celebrated and notorious crime Downunder.  It's been pretty obvious that Henry is a prime suspect in this investigation -- in fact, it turns out that he almost beat a child to death in an assault a few years before Liston vanished.  But there's no body and no proof sufficient to connect this prime suspect to the crime.  So the cops have constructed an elaborate ruse, involving a dozens of operatives, to seduce Henry into admitting the murder and leading them to the body.  This is revealed in stages throughout the movie.  The disturbing aspect of this plot is that we come to sympathize with Henry, a classic half-mad loner, and the cops are generally thuggish, cruel, and have no difficulty at all playing the roles of mobsters -- in fact, they seem to have been born and bred to be criminals.  Mark Frame, the police protagonist entrusted with befriending the child-murderer, is a heavy drinker and seems to be declining into serious depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.  He can't sleep and is afflicted by terrible nightmares in which his dreams are haunted by the uncanny Henry -- a strange, unpredictable, and pathetic mad man.  (At one point, Henry sexually gropes Mark -- later, Henry says that when he was in prison he was fascinated by amputee porn and he remarks:  "You seem to me to be kind of an amputee.")  Frame becomes fearful that Henry will discover the plot and assault his own son.  He keeps repeating a therapeutic mantra about breathing and out and releasing the dark energy on exhalation -- at various times, the film visualizes this by showing us horrific clouds of smoke and fire, possibly a reference as well to the wild-fires that have burned to destructively in Australia recently.  Henry literally has trouble breathing -- he uses an inhaler.  In some ways, Henry is more sympathetic than Mark.  Henry dances for Mark seductively, swaying his body to a tune called "Blue Trojan."  (Mark has said that he doesn't like music.)  On one occasion, Henry, who claims to have been raised as a charismatic evangelical, simulates seizures -- these would be the sort of spasms that someone speaking in tongues might display and the spectacle is truly alarming.  Henry lives in a remote bungalow (he says his wife is suffering from anxiety and depression and she is nowhere to be seen); the bungalow is similar to the strange house where Mark lives, a place with odd stucco and plaster entries shaped with arched tops.  Henry wants to be trained as a pilot and there are some peculiar scenes at a remote airfield.  There is concern that the "sting" is taking too long to develop and that Henry may "fly the coop."  So one of the more aggressive cops takes over for Mark (who is sidelined in film's last half hour -- also a surreal development because Mark seems to be the film's main character.)  A coroner's subpoena is served on Henry (this turns out not to be his real name) and the fake crooks tell him that he has to confess to them, not so that he can be judged, but so that the gangsters will know if he exposes their criminal enterprise to law enforcement scrutiny.  Henry confesses and is arrested.  In the film's last ten minutes, many cops search the area where Henry killed the child, looking for clues of the murder.  There's been a flood and the landscape -- it seems to be a tree plantation under the strange conical mountain (a great monolith of granite) --has changed.  But, at last, some trace of the crime is found.  

The Stranger is glacially cold and abstract, although it has some genuinely disturbing and frightening scenes.  In its pace and mise-en-scene, the movie resembles The Investigation, a Danish mini-series that was similarly reticent and resolutely non-sensational about the effects of a terrible crime.  (The Investigation is also about a true crime -- the murder of the journalist Kim Wall aboard a home-made submarine built by the killer, Thomas Madsen.)  The movie is constructed from tiny clues and gestures:  the murderer is said to have been standing like "a stork with one leg crossed behind the other" and leaning against a wall when the child vanished.  At the end of the movie, Henry stands in that posture leaning against a tree.  The dozens of cops searching for forensic evidence are told to "raise a hand if you find anything."  We see a row of police, maybe about ten men in orange jumpsuits, digging with trowels in mucky field.  There is a reverse shot taken from behind the searchers.  And, of course, after a long time -- probably 15 seconds -- someone cautiously raises his hand.  As in The Investigation, we never see what has been found -- the horrors are kept scrupulously off-screen.  This sort of thing is beyond reproach and the clammy atmosphere in The Stranger is exceedingly effective.  One of the film's disturbing aspects is that shots are designed to create suspense about whether Henry will discover the elaborate plot -- but the plot is so all-encompassing, it can't be discovered; rather, everything is just blithely accommodated to the sting; when Henry walks in on bunch of police plotting against him, the cops simply say that they are also gangsters and working on designing a crime.  There is literally nothing that can reveal the conspiracy to Henry -- the conspiracy is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  It's an impressive movie,  but there's a sense that, in a way, the film is as pointless and nihilistic as the crime that it concerns.   As an exercise in style, however, The Stranger is well worth the viewer's attention. 

(The events in the film involve the murder of a boy named Daniel Morcombe in Queensland, Australia.  The killer, Brett Parker Cowie, was, indeed, captured as a result of a very complicated sting operation, a so-called Mr. Big ruse in which the suspect is inducted into a pretend criminal gang and encouraged to confess to the gang's leader, "Mr. Big."  The family is incensed about this film and has demanded that the name of real victim be omitted -- the little boy is called James Liston in the movie, but the reference to Kate Kyriaco's book in the closing titles does show his name.  The peculiar looking monolith in the film is Mount Beerwagh in the Glass House Mountains in Queensland, the place where Cowie concealed his victim's corpse. Henry is modeled closely on Brett Cowie.)

  

Hypernormalisation

 Have you ever heard of Vladislav Surkov?  According to the British documentarian, Adam Curtis, Surkov, an advisor to Vladimir Putin, is a former proponent of avant garde theater who developed an approach to politics based on chaos -- the government, in Surkov's practice, might support democracy in the morning, fascism in the afternoon, and be mildly liberal and progressive by nightfall; the idea was to foment confusion by supporting all possible ideological enterprises to create a society so wholly divided and contentious that a single man (in Surkov's case, Vladimir Putin) could control all organs of power so long as the baffling internecine conflict between factions endured.  By Curtis' model, Trump is a Surkovian President -- thus, the Donald's baffling allegiance to Putin.  Whether you are willing to believe that Surkov's political nihilism has something to do with American electoral politics is, perhaps, a litmus test for whether you are willing to suspend your disbelief as to the assertions advanced by Curtis in his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation.  (A cursory review of the Internet shows that Curtis' characterization of Surkov is radically simplified and partially incorrect -- if you believe Wikipedia; however, there is enough overlap between Wikipedia's description of Surkov and the thumbnail sketch in Hypernormalisation to give one pause for thought.)

Hypernormalisation is close to three hours long, a paranoid epic that purports to provide the secret history of the world between 1980 and the date of the film's release in 2016.  By turns infuriating, baffling, and brilliant, the movie presents densely argued history of personal feuds and conspiracies in collusion with rogue computer savants that is claimed to have produced our current dilemma.  If only a third of what Curtis argues is true, we are truly and decisively fucked.  Watching the movie is like immersion in a nightmare from which you aren't able to wake-up -- not coincidentally, the way that Joyce's Stephen Daedalus characterizes history in Ulysses.  The picture's paranoid style is swift and brazenly declaratory -- the movie proclaims one alarming thesis after another without providing much in the way of evidence for its assertions; it moves at such an accelerated pace that the audience doesn't have time to think, let alone consider whether what is declared as truth is plausible.  Briefly stated, the movie's thesis is that around 1980, political elites discovered that the world was too interrelated, complex, and resistant to anyone's theory to be effectively controlled -- in other words, that it was futile to attempt to manipulate or shape real events in history.  Therefore, these elites set about constructing a simulacrum of reality, a fictive politics and history, that could be effectively manipulated -- although this manipulation was for the public eye and the media and, really, had nothing to do with what was really going on.  Curtis stops short of claiming that there is some master manipulator who is secretly controlling "real life" as opposed to the fictional constructs in which we find ourselves now immersed.  As far as he is concerned, actual reality is chaos that can't really be known, at least, presently -- in Kantian terms, the real world is a Ding-an-sich that is, apparently, beyond anyone's understanding.  The elites invent problems to solve them -- but none of this has any relevancy to "reality" whatever that might be.

There are several objections to this thesis.  First, I doubt that political ideology has ever been closely rooted in empirical reality whatever the epoch.  Was the ideology of medieval Catholic Europe with its saints and witches and religious crusades somehow more "realistic" than the way our modern world is constructed?  What about the Aztecs who embraced an ideology of human sacrifice in order to control large urban populations, alleging that without human blood as lubrication, natural forces would grind to a halt?  Were these constructs more rational and true to reality than late Capitalism or Marxism or what have you?  Further, Curtis' blithely stated assertion that the elites lost interest in "politics" as a solution to human problems and preferred to operate in an invented world founders on the absence of any definition of what might constitute "politics".  In the middle of the film, Curtis lets drop the veil briefly and claims that politics is the endeavor to improve the world by helping those who are powerless or disenfranchised.  When has this ever been a reasonable definition for political activity?

The film's grandiose claims can't be really assessed without understanding Curtis' "shadow history", the secret "lipstick traces" that offer access to what has really happened in the years since 1980.  So, here goes nothing:  In the late 1970's New York City defaulted on its loan and bond obligations and, so, the City survived only by selling itself to the bankers.  This event became the paradigm for how capitalist polities survived the various economic and fiscal crises of the last fifty years -- the financiers took over and ran the world for their profit.  Meanwhile, Patti Smith declared herself without ideology and, in some perky interview footage, identifies as radically non-ideological -- an esthetic hedonist, again a model for the way Western youth came of age in a world in which they couldn't exercise any real power.  The film devises a tale of two cities:  NYC and Damascus, Syria.  NYC is dominated by Donald Trump, one of the movie's arch confabulators.  Assad in Syria wants to unite the Arab world against Western domination.  He flirts with the evil Henry Kissinger who plays Realpolitik  with his aspirations.  Kissinger stabs Assad in the back engendering a violent split in the Arab world between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.  Assad retreats into isolation, scheming revenge and building an ominous-looking giant palace on the mountains overlooking Damascus, one of the film's visual leit motifs. Assad makes a Mephistofilean-deal with Hezbollah.  Shiite clerics relax the Koran's prohibition on suicide to level the playing field by using the "human bomb" -- that is, suicide bombers -- to drive the U. S. out of the Middle East.  (The "human bomb" is one of Curtis' themes and it will return with a vengeance on 9-11.)  Since the US government can't control the chaos in Syria (Iraq and Lebanon as well), the government nominates Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to play the role of super-villain since he can be effectively bombed and attacked without fear of much retaliation -- Gaddafi,  is after all, just a convenient, picturesque-looking idiot.  But the real trouble in the Arab world is fomented by Assad, whom we proclaim to be our ally.  The Utopian dreams of the 60's have soured into nightmares.  But the old Acid-freaks, particularly a Grateful Dead follower named Barlow, have migrated to Silicon Valley where they are configuring an alternative reality.  The skies throng UFO's but these are secret anti-Soviet weapons.  (The government encourages people to believe in aliens piloting the UFOs to hide the truth.)  When the Soviet Union collapses, politics in that unhappy empire dissolves completely.  The new Russia is just a series of pageants conducted in an atmosphere of chaotically clashing, but meaningless, political parties.  A German named Ulrich Beck argues that no one can control reality -- there are too many unintended consequences. The whole purpose of politics, Beck says, is to stabilize and shore up collapsing economic systems.  No one can control events, but with massively enhanced computing power, catastrophes can be predicted if not averted.  People turn to computers for solace.  The government is spying on everyone but most of what is disseminated on-line is dick pics and pornography.  AI simply creates feedback loops, counseling people by repeating back to them their concerns in an empathetic tone.  When Israel puts Hamas fighters onto a mountain in Syria (to destabilize Assad), the Hamas movement gets infected with Shiite "human bomb" ideology which, then, leaks back into Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.  Both Sunni and Shiite Arabs are now using suicide bombs.  Again, the West blames this terrorism on Gaddafi who has nothing to do with any of this -- but who finds it thrilling to be the designated public enemy number 1 of the West.  Computers warn everyone that the future is bleak or, even, more or less, nonexistent.  This leads to a spectacular montage of skyscrapers blown to pieces in NYC, all from Michael Bay blockbuster movies that turn out to exactly anticipate the attacks on 9-11.  The CIA learns that Hussein is storing biological agents in glass bulbs and convinces the military and the politicians to launch an attack on Iraq.  But, it turns out that the details as to these nerve agents all come from a movie by Michael Bay called The Rock and there's no truth to it at all -- but by this time no one cares about the truth.  The media and elites manufacture straw-man villains who we then attack while the real bad guys are somewhere else -- apparently, in Assad's fortress of solitude looming over Damascus.  Old man Assad dies and his son, Bashar, carries on the vendetta against the USA -- he dispatches armies of terrorist suicide bombers into the Iraqi insurgency again humiliating the American forces.  But the suicide bombers can't be controlled and the situation in Iraq devolves into a bloody Sunni v. Shiite civil war.  After blaming Gaddafi for the Lockerbie bombing, with whom the Colonel had nothing to do, Bush and his Brit counterpart, Tony Blair, decide that they need to elevate Gaddafi into a hero and he is widely lionized in the West for abandoning a non-existent nuclear program (while Iran meanwhile continues to develop its nukes.)  Gaddafi is invited to speak at the United Nations where he makes a looney-tunes address and sleeps at night in a luxury tent on property leased to him by Donald Trump.  (There's a bizarre tour of problems at Trump's Atlantic City casinos involving dueling masterminds, a Japanese gambler named Kashiwagi who has broken the code and is siphoning millions off Trump's gaming enterprises versus a guy named Jess Marcum who is Trump's factotum -- in any event, Kashiwagi is supposed to return to Trump his ill-gotten gambling profits, but the Yakuza butcher Kashiwagi and Trump doesn't get his money back.  This, in turn, forces Trump into bankruptcy and, without profit-making endeavors, he has to make a fateful turn toward TV and celebrity status.  Because of the lies and corruption exposed by the debacle involving weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, all young people embark on an "inner emigration" and simply flee into cyberspace.  (Here, Davis uses a repeated shot from Tron of the digital hero crossing a threshold.)  The Internet and Facebook spawn picturesque but ineffective revolutions -- Occupy Wall Street in Trump's NYC and the Arab Spring.  The Arab Spring leads to an uprising in Libya and Gaddafi, abandoned by his erstwhile allies in the West, reverts to being a pathetic embattled master-villain -- he gets beaten to death.  (Gaddafi is finally run to earth when a CIA drone operated by remote control out of Oklahoma bombs his convoy escaping across the desert.)  Trump runs for president.  He's reviled by all liberals but, by this time, communication networks have become systems of self-fulfilling algorithms -- no one gets any news that they are not predisposed to like due to the Artificial Intelligence managing dissemination of information over the internet.  The liberals can denounce Trump to their heart's content but they are only denouncing him to people like themselves.

There's a lot more stuff in Hypernormalisation. There are dozens of names of shadowy figures said to pulling the strings -- most of them are people that I had never heard of.  For instance, I wasn't aware that Jed Pearl, who got beheaded by Arab terrorists, was the son of Judea Pearl, a prominent early AI exponent -- that is, one of the people complicit in developing the fictional world on which political elites purport to have influence.  I didn't know that East Wenatchee, Washington is the home of some sort of monster computer that knows everything about every aspect of the future -- in fact, until I saw this movie, I had never heard of East Wenatchee at all.  Curtis scores his sinister non-stop revelations to ominous music and, about every ten minutes, this phrase occurs:  "But, then, a strange thing happened...", a formula that denotes that attempts to manipulate reality always have unintended and completely bizarre consequences.  For instance, Kissinger's manipulation of Syria to eliminate pan-Arab alliances ends up with the Twin Towers being destroyed in NYC.  

I have long criticized Ken Burns for developing his films are two parallel tracks -- there is an elaborate narration and an equally elaborate pictorial system of images, but, for the most part, the two don't intersect.  That is, the pictures have nothing to do with the narrative except to provide a sort of atmospheric wall-paper for the spoken word. Curtis takes this technique to its logical extreme.  The imagery that he shows, often very dramatic, has nothing to do with his narration -- at least in most cases.  In fact, Curtis often uses his elaborate montages to undercut or subvert what he is saying.  There are notable exceptions, for instance, the disaster-film montage before the 9-11 attacks, but, by and large, it's very hard to construe how the spectacular pictures correlate to the argument imposed on the viewer.  We see helicopters lit by laser pointers over Tahrir Square so that they look like hovering clouds of data, innumerable ominous drone and helicopter shots -- East Wenatchee is made to look like something out of The X-Files, although Wikipedia shows it to be a pleasant-looking suburb nestled in mountains.  Strange orbs and lights roam around darkened woods; the air is full of UFOs floating here and there or zipping along at high-speed.  Complicated highway interchanges model flows of information.  In the Middle East, we see fountains dyed red to simulate blood and mangled corpses under tarps still leaking smoke into the air.  Lenin's rosy embalmed corpse sits in a column of amber light.  Kissinger is always evasive, looking away from the camera furtively and scratching his nose.  Reagan and his wife hold hands as they plot perfidiously.  At about the film's midpoint, the weirdness reaches a kind of horrific crescendo -- we see thugs beating up Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian autocrat, and his wife, intercut with Jane Fonda exercise videos, elaborately choreographed spectacles in which Jane looks deranged and fanatical (the point is that she has withdrawn from politics, no longer Hanoi Jane but Exercise Fanatic Jane).  I don't know what exactly this is supposed to mean but the bizarre montage is certainly weirdly effective.  The fact is that most of Curtis' argument relies on secret events, things, by definition, hidden from view and, so, the film has to rely on evocative, if obscure, footage to suggest ominous actions that have been concealed from us.  (The movie reminds viewers of Donald Trump's early appeal -- he prowls through his casinos with a kind of magnetic feral savagery that is intensely charismatic; it's all contrived and the film sometimes shows his marital problems, but, when he was in his thirties, Trump was very handsome and there was a certain brusque poetry to the way that he spoke.)

The curious thing about Curtis' film is that it falls prey to the very malaise that it condemns.  A collage of half-truths and paranoid surmise, the film is hermetic in the sense that it seems curiously sealed off from real life.  The picture is kin to certain highly cerebral documentaries such as Chris Marker's masterpiece Sans Soleil and Barrison and Ross' The Ister.  But those films seem radically more "open".  Curtis poses questions only to immediately answer them.  In effect, he's creating an alternative reality, like the "alternative facts" to which Trump's factotum, Kellyanne Conway, alluded.  Like the technocrats in Curtis' Hypernormalisation, the film posits a history that can be readily understood, assimilated to certain political positions, and manipulated.  The enterprise is questionable but the picture is fascinating -- it's like watching a spectacular and protracted train wreck.

Censor

 Film censor Enid Baines is going through a "rough patch" as they say in the U.K.  Enid suspects that she murdered her own sister, Nina, years earlier during a amnesiac episode.  In the alternative, Enid thinks her sister may be alive but about to be butchered in a "video nasty" snuff film.  And to add to her travails, she passed a film called Deranged for audiences 15 and up; the movie features a scene in which someone cuts off a person's face and eats it -- exactly what some madman had done in real life, a crime for which the poor censor, Enid, is now being blamed to the extent that she is dogged by hostile media and tormented by hateful and threatening phone calls.  Enid is on the brink of running amok, and, just before, she takes an axe and starts hacking people to pieces, one of her co-workers snippily remarks "Someone here has lost the plot."  Censor (2021), the film that chronicles Enid's accumulating misfortunes, is a production financed primarily by the British Film Institute (BFI) and, so, it has some pretensions toward significance and artistry.  But, in fact, the film is a glum low-budget horror film, reasonably effective, but not much better than the stuff that the picture satirizes.  Set in 1985, the movie is a period piece:  Mrs. Thatcher, among other politicians, is calling for a crackdown on sex-and-gore films made on the cheap and, apparently, so popular that certain pundits are blaming them for rampant crime and social disintegration.  The film's sets are almost entirely underground, long dark tunnels, subway platforms, and ill-lit dingy offices that might as well be subterranean as well.  Until the last three or four shots, everything takes place in darkness -- streets are empty, probably to avoid the expense of gathering period automobiles for the movie.  As with pornography, people's houses serve as sets -- and the same low-buck strategies used to shoot "video nasties" are, also, employed in Censor creating a self-reflexive meta-textural narrative, mirrors reflecting mirrors in a mise en abyme:  the heroine's job is censoring "video nasties" and the film in which we see her, ultimately, morphs into just such a picture -- indeed, the last shot in the movie is a VHS tape being ejected from a grungy-looking video-player:  the name of the film marked on the VHS spine is Censor.

Censor is essentially a low-budget horror film about a woman who's job is to censor and require cuts in low-budget horror films.  Although there is some incidental social commentary about British politics and the right-wing cult of "law and order", the gist of the movie is murder, rape, and mutilation.  The film teases us with graphic shots of mayhem (in the title sequence someone gets gruesomely murdered with a power drill) before embracing that same kind of mayhem at the film's climax.  The picture is too gloomy and claustrophobic to be much fun, but it's reasonably scary.  The social commentary is bogus and hypocritical.  At a mere 82 minutes, Censor doesn't wear out its welcome but in the end, there's less here than meets the eye.   

We first meet Enid making notes on some anonymous gore-fest, remarking that the eye-gouging scene is too realistic.  It seems that the censors don't object to brutality so long as its ineptly and unrealistically staged.  (The face-eating episode in Deranged was passed because the special effects were so poor that the scene was risible.)  All the best stuff in Censor occurs in the first twenty minutes.  When Enid wants to snip some of the eye-gouging, her blase colleague says that it's "part of a grand tradition, you know Oedipus Rex, Polyphemus in the Odyssey, of course, King Lear and even -- dare I say -- Un Chien Andalou."  The string of allusions flatters the audience and gives a sophisticated tone to the proceedings, of course, before everything devolves into axe murders.  Enid, quite reasonably, replies that "You lost the argument when you brought Shakespeare into the room."  That night, Enid learns that her parents intend to implement a death certificate on Enid's little sister, Nina, who vanished many years earlier when she was under our heroine's supervision.  There are some dark intimations that Enid has suffered a mental breakdown earlier, possibly triggered by painful memories of her sister's disappearance.  Enid begins to flash-back to the day of Nina's vanishing.  (In these sequences, the movie borrows very liberally from David Lynch's Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk with Me -- there is the same dark and morbid-looking woods, the same shack in the shadows, and, even, the same horrible-looking tramp implicated in the murder.)  Enid learns that her sister, if she wasn't murdered by our heroine herself, may still be alive but, possibly, slated for slaughter in a "Snuff" film directed by someone named Frederick North.  Enid does some sleuthing and tracks down the location where North is planning to shoot a murder scene.  The tiny crew for the horror film that North is making somehow seems to expect Enid's appearance.  In fact, Enid is made-up to appear in the movie -- she's smeared with blood, dressed in white, and handed an axe.  This, of course, turns out to be a serious mistake.  

Censor ends with some satirical passages in bright sunlight.  Nina learns that "video nasties" have been completely banned and that crime in the UK has diminished to "zero".  A rainbow appears over England's green and pleasant land. Censorship has delivered on its promise and everyone in Great Britain is now happy, fulfilled and safe.  These shots are also redolent of David Lynch as well (the firemen on their truck with Dalmatians in Blue Velvet for  instance) and the American's influence hangs heavy over this film -- as in Lynch movies, there are repeated shots of characters moving from gloom into complete annihilating darkness.  The film was directed by a young woman named Prano Bailey-Bond,  She does good work with very limited material.  The parts of the film that are most interesting involve the censors, their interactions, and the rationales they provide for their work. (In an interview, Bailey-Bond remarks that "video nasties" came with a prologue in which a bureaucrat sternly intoned that it was a felony crime for someone under the age of 12 (or 15 or 18) to watch the movie -- reasonably enough, she says that the scariest thing about the video was this preface.)  Since the censorship of the video nasties is soon supplanted by various murders and horror sequences, the best thing about the movie is quickly enough submerged in a predictable slasher narrative.  This is unfortunate because the closely researched parts of the movie relating to censorship are the most interesting things in the film.  

Jannis Kounellis (at the WAC)

A retrospective of 50 works made by the Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936 - 2017) demonstrates with single-minded commitment the weaknesses of Arte Povera.  Kounellis worked entirely within this vein between 1960 and about 2000 and, with a couple of exceptions (atypical of his work) created nothing of any interest.  Arte Povera was a mainstream movement in Italian contemporary art.  As the name implies, Arte Povera artists used materials that had no intrinsic value or esthetic qualities -- in the case of Kounnellis, bags made of jute or burlap, metal plates, bits of broken furniture, old shoes set on piles of lead sheared into sole shapes, coffee, fragments of wool and old plaster casts, airline cable and broken wooden piers.  What you see is what you get -- and this work is not rewarding.  It is hard to write about because Kounellis' ouevre is so impoverished he doesn't give names to his creations -- everything is simply "Untitled" with a date behind the word.  There's nothing to see here and Arte Povera, at least in the hands of Kounellis seems to be a cul-de-sac; the works don't evolve or progress in any way -- shabby-looking in 1967, the later sculptures are equally shabby.  Nothing is painted.  The junk is just hooked to steel plates and stuck on the wall.  (This show is very, very heavy -- and I mean this literally; I would estimate the combines of raw-looking steel and bulky broken wood to weigh, in total, about 20 tons.)

The Kounellis exhibition is divided into six galleries.  The most spectacular items are in the last gallery described as a sort of reprise of the artist's themes.  Kounellis began with paintings of letters, some of them stenciled on pieces of rough plywood and, then, painted over.  The first gallery looks a bit like the early work of Jasper Johns.  These alphabet painting are crudely made and seem to have been produced between about 1960 and 1967.  Kounellis, then, did a series of large works that are vaguely nautical.  The objects seem to be fragments of wooden boats and pier infrastructure looped by elaborate tangles of air-line cable to flat plates of steel. (This theme is reiterated in a later gallery in which large bits of cheap furniture are stuck to metal plates.) One object suspends a big burlap sack of something from a superstructure of timber and metal -- it looks like a thing you might find hanging from sea-going vessel at dock.  In another room, there are three long, utilitarian shelves with hundreds of pieces of cheap-looking glass ware on them -- at the center of the middle shelf, there's a single small shot-glass that has a vaguely pinkish color.  This seems an inadequate and impoverished response to viewers who would like their art to be attractive, even beautiful, and, perhaps, classically symmetrical.  Other objects are metal cots stacked with wool, a series of suspended trays on which there are neat piles of either sulphur or coffee.  Another set of shelves displays nothing but traces of burning on the walls where something was lit on fire with a propane torch and allowed to burn itself to ashes leaving soot on the white walls.  There are some plywood booths of the kind you used to see in old porno places -- these were used for a installation in which the artist hid in one booth behind a plaster-cast classical mask while someone in the other booth played fragments from Mozart's Magic Flute.  The last gallery is large and contains two works that are impressive by their sheer size.  Against one wall there is a forty-foot frame of I-beams that encloses four- or five-foot long timbers, stacked together to create a rough-hewn wall.  Across from this object, there are seven big sails, some of them thirty or forty feet in size, brown, ocher, yellow, and cream-colored.  On one of the sails there is an image of the crucified Christ.  By this point in the show, the viewer is so satiated with blacks and dark brown and lead, the color of old dock works, that the eye is, in fact, enthused to see anything with a figurative meaning and, indeed, an overdetermined meaning like Jesus on the cross -- the work is big and has a sort of gloomy magnificence like the huge wall of stacked timber, but these effects are the result of scale only and the painting of Christ is completely inconsistent with the rest of the show.  

I didn't like the show.  Kounellis dramatizes ugliness.  He shoves it in your face.  I understand that the purpose of the art is to sensitize the viewer to the junk-yard qualities of the broken wood, the metal plates and the hooks and cables.  But the world is so full of ugliness and decay that it seems a little gratuitous to set our to achieve an effect that you can find in any scrap yard or construction site anywhere in the world.  

Edward Tulane (Minnesota Opera on October 15, 2022)

 Edward Tulane is an opera based on a novel by Kate DiCamillo.  The libretto is by Mark Campbell with music composed by Paola Prestini.  The most famous member of this trio is DiCamillo, a writer of books for young adults who became famous with her first novel Because of Winn Dixie.  Ms. DiCamillo has written a number of books, many of them bestsellers and highly regarded.  Edward Tulane had a long and difficult gestation -- COVID delayed the production, a world premiere, for a couple years.  The opera is about two hours long, divided into two acts of approximately equal duration.  The production was lavish and colorful, involving many set changes (implemented on stage without dropping the curtain) and requires a large cast, although most of the parts can be doubled.  Because the story is a fairy tale, the show features elaborate costumes -- there are jelly-fish, sea-horses, a murder of scary-looking crows, a talking dog, a rat and a wart-hog to name a few of the characters who appear in lavish full-body costume;  in fact, one of the figures resembles, from a distance, the cowardly lion as he appears in the famous movie-production of The Wizard of Oz.  The action is staged within a framework that can be made to appear as rigging on a ship, a ruinous Victorian house, or an industrial site:  big timbers support a frame-work of box-like cells with eaves and gables.  This part of the set doesn't vary but can be transformed into different sorts of environments by lighting effects. Within the box of this heavy-looking scaffolding, various mobile sets can be deployed -- they are simply pushed into place to provide platforms or enclosures for the singers.  There are ingenious lighting effects -- stars with comet-like tails on the back wall, scrims to simulate water when the titular character is under the sea, and, at one point, Edward Tulane even dons white angel wings and is shoved toward the front of the stage atop a launch-pad of scaffolding:  he threatens to fly up to heaven to join a poor little girl who has died.  The effects have the sort of elaborate, over-done and "magical" aspect of productions at the Minnesota Childen's Theater and the influence of MCT pantomime-style staging is everywhere evident in the set design and blocking.  There's no question that the show is a treat for the eyes, although like most confectionary the imagery tends to be overly sweet and cloying.

Edward Tulane is a stuffed rabbit.  In the show, he is represented by a rabbit doll that seems to be about a yard long and by an actor who sings his lines.  The actor wears a rabbit suit, on occasion stylish human garb, and has big stiff ears.  The plot is episodic but fairly simple.  A little girl receives a stuffed rabbit at Christmas whom she dubs "Edward Tulane."  When she takes a sea voyage on the Queen Mary, the rabbit is snatched by bullies and, for no good reason, thrown in the sea.  After sitting on the bottom of the ocean for awhile (with the aforementioned sea horses, jellyfish and an octopus), a fisherman drags the toy ashore in his net.  The fisherman and his wife are lonely and their children are grown and so they are pleased to have the stuffed doll as part of their home.  But a mean woman, possibly a daughter, intervenes and for no good reason, takes the rabbit away from them and throws it on a garbage heap.  The rabbit is retrieved from the garbage by a talking dog who brings the toy to his master, a hobo.  The hobo re-names the rabbit Malone -- perhaps, in homage to Sam Beckett.  (Each successive owner renames the doll and dresses it according to his or her own tastes -- much to the dismay of Edward Tulane, who if truth be known, spends most of the opera whining about his changes in fortune.) When the railroad cops attack the tramps, the doll again changes hands and ends up as a scarecrow in a corn field where he is menaced by sinister-looking crows.  A boy finds the rabbit posted as a scarecrow and takes him home to comfort his little sister who is dying.  The boy and his sister are the victims of a fat swaggering drunk who is their abusive father.  These adventures bring the first act to a close with a chorus involving all the characters who have owned Edward Tulane up to this point.

In the second half, the boy's sister has died.  When he is threatened by his drunken and vicious father, the boy departs with the rabbit, leaving pa passed-out cold on the stage.  (The fat singer getting up unassisted from lying on his back on the stage was the highlight of the opera for me; the spry, heavy set performer in Jeremiah Sanders and my hat's off to him.)  The boy takes the rabbit to Memphis where he has him rigged up as a marionette and earns some money from passers-by when he makes the stuffed rabbit dance.  The boy and rabbit go to a diner and order all sorts of food (three slices of pecan pie, pronounced "pee-can"); of course, they don't have enough to pay for the lavish meal and so the cook, who righteously indignant, smashes the rabbit's head on the counter and knocks him out.  (The boy now is out of the story.)  Edward wakes up in the shop of a crazed toy-restorer.  The restorer has fixed up Edward, miming the repairs while he babbles out a song that is half annoying nonsense syllables -- it's as if the librettist has just given up during this scene.  The crazy toy-doctor puts Edward up for sale, displaying him on three steeply sloped shelves on which about fifteen other dolls sit, dressed in doll clothes and holding their toy replicas on their lap.  This part of the show is deeply creepy -- it's sort of like a slave auction.  The toy shop proprietor berates the dolls for not showing sufficient brilliance to be sold; the poor dolls frantically compete for the attention of customers.  It's all pretty hellish and disturbing.  At last, a mother and girl enter the shop.  The girl has lost her beloved doll at a cafe.  (Query?  why doesn't she and mom just go back to look for the doll.)  The child demands that her mother replace the doll before they go home.  The little girl (who like all children in this show seems to be about 35) picks out Edward Tulane and, in the anti-climactic final scene, we see the Victorian house set with which the show commenced -- are we supposed to believe that the mother and child are the same people who originally unwrapped Edward Tulane, now about 15 years earlier?  This is unclear to me.

The libretto mines a vein of pathos exploited by Hans Christian Andersen in stories like "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" and "The Old House".  This is the pathos of once beloved toys being cast aside, no longer loved, and left to rot.  In these kinds of tales, the toys are sentient and so we experience their grief and despair at being abandoned.  (The film bears some resemblances to Steven Spielberg's infinitely morose AI, particularly in the scenes where the doll -- Spielberg used robots -- is drowned in the depths of the sea.)  Not content with showing the suffering of the animate doll, the libretto also features the off-stage death of a sickly little girl protected from her belligerent, indifferent and drunken father by her teenage brother.  The show poses this question;  who is the intended audience for this opera?  Some of the material is very harsh and not in the bland, circumstantial way of the classical fairy tales, but in the quasi-realistic and disturbing manner of a Dickens' novel or one of Hans Christian Andersen's more sado-masochistic fables.  (The slave auction of the dolls is particularly grim and distressing.)  I would expect very young children would be appalled by this material.  Teenagers aren't going to attend an opera and adults will find the material predictable and simple-minded without any real conflict or meaningful characterizations.  The opera is lavish, colorful, and undoubtedly expensive to produce, but it isn't likely to really please anyone -- I say this notwithstanding the tremendous applause that the piece garnered at the show that I attended.  The libretto is poorly written and involves lots of unmotivated actions and, at key moments, the show requires its protagonists to act in wholly inexplicable and irresponsible ways -- why would the wise child order a dinner that he can't possibly afford?  And isn't it a little questionable to imply that we should dislike the cook who, after all, has been defrauded?  If the dolls are truly inanimate to humans, then why does everyone talk to them?  And why is toy-shop owner so vicious in demanding that they "shine" to be purchased?  Some strands of the libretto are left unresolved.  Everyone seems to wonder why Edward Tulane can't talk?  (I didn't have any problem with this -- he's a stuffed rabbit and doesn't have the ability to speak.)  But shouldn't Edward's inability to speak be solved with a splendid aria at the end of the opera that can be heard by others on stage?  But this doesn't happen.  Edward is rather unpleasant, selfish and always whining about his situation -- to be sure being sunk to the bottom of ocean or harried by crows isn't too pleasant but his self-pity is a little off-putting.  The plot seems to require that Edward Tulane grow to appreciate love and become loving himself.  The world "love" is used about a hundred times in the libretto, an over-emphasis that is maudlin and manipulative.  Although the opera is through-composed, I can't recall any impressive music of any kind, no memorable tunes or interesting orchestration (although a large orchestra is necessary to the performance).  The music is all recitative with a few numbers for trio, octet, or chorus that are completely forgettable.  There are scenes that don't really make much sense -- the mother of the child who first owned the doll in the First Act tells a fairy-tale about a princess who rejects love and, for that offense, gets turned into a wart-hog.  I guess the story is supposed to be thematic -- Edward Tulane is unable to love or show his love.  The fairy-tale is acted out with elaborate costumes and pantomime.  The child hearing the story comments on its unsatisfactory ending and wonders out loud what the tale is supposed to mean.  We second her complaints.  This show cost a fortune to produce and is performed with passion and devotion, but I don't think it's any good.  (The audience on the 15th of October disagreed with my assessment.)

Bluebeard

 Bluebeard (1942) directed by Edgar Ulmer has a strong critical reputation.  Despite it's Poverty Row attributes, the movie is said to be well-directed and features a strong performance by John Carradine.  Ulmer made an earlier version of the Bluebeard story in his 1932 The Black Cat, an eccentric if brilliant horror film starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.  Unfortunately, Ulmer's 1942 film seems to me to be pretty much of a dud.  Perhaps, my criticisms of the film are a bit unfair -- the movie seems to exist in only severely degraded forms and it's hard to watch.  But, I think, the movie, despite some effective sequences, was never very good and recent re-evaluations of Ulmer's work (he is often a very interesting director) have encouraged critics to think Bluebeard is better than it is.

"Bluebeard" is used in the film as a general term for a serial killer of young women.  Carradine's Gaston Morel, accordingly, is called by police authorities "the Bluebeard".  Viewers hoping to find in the film the content of the famous Grimm's fairy tale  or the more famous and elaborate version of the tale by Charles Perrault will be disappointed. Someone is strangling young women in Paris and dumping their bodies in the Seine.  Upon our first view of John Carradine, as Gaston Morel, there's no doubt as to the culprit.  Morel is running a marionette theater and performing Gounod's Faust for onlookers.  He is intrigued by a young woman who takes an interest in the show.  She's a seamstress and Morel engages her to sew new costumes for a puppet ballet that he intends to stage.  Morel's girlfriend, who has been singing the role of Marguerite, becomes jealous and so he strangles her -- there's a hidden staircase behind bookshelves in his Atelier and he carries her down to the sewers where the corpse is dropped in water that flows into the Seine.  Before becoming a puppet-theater entrepreneur, Morel was a painter and had the unfortunate habit of murdering his models after portraying them on canvas.  One of his incriminating pictures has come up for sale, offered to the public by a sinister art dealer.  The picture shows one of the dead women posed against a decadent backdrop that features naked women -- it's never shown in any detail due to its erotic subject matter but the images look like women drawn by Felicien Rops.  An inspector summons all of Paris' prostitutes to court and interrogates them as to whether they know the identity of the painter.  They are uncooperative and ribaldly rebuff efforts to question them.  Meanwhile, Lucille, the seamstress, goes to visit Morel and finds a cravat that he used to strangle his girlfriend -- it's torn and the woman offers to stitch it back together.  Lucille's sister, who looks just like her, appears in Paris.  She's the girlfriend of the inspector who is trying to track down the murderer.  She agrees to serve as bait for the murderer and the gendarms offer a lot of money to the artist who will agree to paint her.  Morel needs the money and so he invites the girl to his studio and, when she recognizes him (she's previously seen him with her sister) strangles her and also kills the art dealer who is in cahoots with him.  There's a pointless flashback in which Morel reveals that one of his paintings was defamed by a prostitute who served as his subject and this has induced him to work to purify the city by killing whores.  (We don't need this information at this late stage in the film.)  Lucille learns that the ligature used to kill her sister was repaired by being stitched-up.  She decides to confront Morel about his murder of her sister.  Morel strangles her until she is unconscious, but the cops have trailed her to his Atelier and, after Morel escapes through a transom, there is a chase across the rooftops of Paris that involves several cops getting manhandled but ends with Morel plunging into the Seine from an eaves trough that breaks underfoot.  We see an eerily slow-motion white splash in the black water and the titles tells us that this is "The End".

The movie contains all sorts of stuff -- an extended opera scene involving the uncanny-looking marionettes, satire as to corrupt art dealers, bawdy comedy involving the prostitutes, long and pointless dialogue scenes, and various tours of the cardboard sewers, troughs of water with panels above them painted as archways with weird highlights of unmotivated light.  The fight on the rooftops might be impressive if you could see it, but the version that I watched was completely illegible shadows jumping around on black rooftops -- it looks like scenes from Dr. Caligari, angular gables with figures creeping around on them, intercut with lurid close-ups of cops in agony.  The murder scenes are most managed with sound -- we hear a grunt, get a close-up of Carradine's eyes glaring, and, then, hear something heavy falling to the floor.  The whole thing is only 72 minutes long but, like many pictures of this sort, it actually drags and some of the extensive and pointless dialogue scenes bring the picture to a complete halt.  The bargain-basement sets are cleverly lit to conceal their poverty.  In the first half of the movie, there are some clever sequences and the extremely quick cutting, undertaken to conceal problems with the lighting or sets (if we looked longer and harder, the shots would look very theatrical, staged, and fake), moves the film along with lightning speed until Ulmer thinks that he has to stage a dialogue sequence, parts of the movie that completely static.  Carradine is very handsome in a sinister way -- his face is shaped like an inverted triangle and seems mostly impassive; like a silent star, he acts with his eyes. The soundtrack is Gounod or traces of Mussorgsky -- the Baba Yaga and Great Gate of Kiev music from Pictures at an Exhibition.  In some of the final scenes, the hanging marionettes make weird patterns of shadows on the walls and there's some suggestion that Morel is killing the women to turn them into versions of his puppets -- this is an interesting theme that never, however, develops.  The photography is all very dark with chiaroscuro effects -- the characters traipse around with candles and people's faces are shadowy, with strange highlights at their eyes or across the brow.  (Backgrounds are out of focus, probably to hide that they are empty, and some of the effects are like a poor man's Josef von Sternberg.)  Although the movie has its interesting moments, it doesn't add up to anything worth watching.        

Criss Cross

 In the opening scene in Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949), Yvonne de Carlo is necking with Burt Lancaster between cars parked outside a nightclub.  She breaks the clinch when a car approaches, apparently, fearful of being caught in this embrace.  The actress says that she is very worried and wishes that some fearsome event in the immediate future could be avoided.  Siodmak positions the camera directly in front of the actress as she declares her undying love for Lancaster, how "this time everything will be different" -- a direct address of this kind to the camera seems a warrant of sincerity (Ozu uses this effect often in his films), a display of simple and authentic affection.  But Cross Cross is a film noir, indeed a classic example of the genre and, so, as we come to understand, there is reason to question both the truthfulness of the camera angle and the meaning of the words spoken.

Burt Lancaster plays a dim-witted truckdriver and laborer, Stevie Thompson.  Yvonne de Carlo acts the part of Annie, formerly Stevie's wife, but now married to the sinister gangster, Slim Dundee (played by Dan Duryea who specialized in these sorts of roles).  At a nightclub a few blocks from City Hall (a helicopter shot establishes the location), Stevie fights with Dundee.  It seems as if the fight has been triggered by Stevie's affair with Annie, and, in fact, some real emotions leak into the fray so that a knife is drawn, but, in fact, we discover that the brawl has been contrived to provide the authorities with evidence that Stevie hates Dundee and, therefore, can't be complicit with him in an armored car heist that the men are planning.  The fact that Stevie and Dundee do hate one another as a result of their rivalry over Annie improves the authenticity of the brawl.  These kinds of complications are characteristic of the movie:  people melodramatically "pretend" to emotions that, in fact, they really possess but, also, have to conceal.  It's never clear whether declamations of love or hate are sincere, or just play-acting.  Stevie, a blue-collar stiff, has found a job driving an armored car -- this is convenient because he is participating in a scheme masterminded by Slim Dundee (with the help of a dipsomaniac "professor") to rob the armored car when it brings it payroll to a big, bleak-looking industrial site.  Dundee has apparently used Annie to lure Thompson into playing the crucial role (driver of the armored car and "inside man") in the heist scheme.  None of this clear as events unfold -- the audience has to piece together the complicated motives that drive the film's action.  Furthermore, in keeping with many Hollywood pictures of the era, the story is told by way of an elaborate flashback -- we see the armored car driven by Stevie hastening to its date with destiny and, then, by voice-over Lancaster's character narrates an introduction to an extended flashback providing the backstory to the heist and occupying the better part of the 88 minute movie.  Stevie was previously married to Annie but they divorced as a result of their constant acrimonious bickering.  Stevie leaves town and knocks around the US for two years, unsuccessfully trying to forget Annie.  But these measures are to no avail, and he returns to LA to live with his parents in the picturesque Bunker Hill neighborhood -- the same terrain in which the gangsters are plotting their crime involving the armored car.  The flashback shows us Stevie's initial encounters with Annie, their marital problems, and, then, after Stevie has fled town for a few years, his return to the City and the renewal of his relationship with Annie, although this time covertly since she is married to Slim.  We see the crooks plotting the heist.  This brings us up to date and Siodmak, then, stages the attack on the armored car, an exciting, quickly cut sequence involve multiple shootings, foreboding camera angles, and lots of  toxic gas and smoke.  Stevie is betrayed in the gun battle and badly wounded.  We next see him, helpless in the hospital.  It's obvious that Slim intends to send assassins to murder him.  Annie has fled to a remote cottage on the ocean, always filmed in impressive day-for-night with the black shadow of the building looming over the glittering sunset sea.  Stevie is kidnaped but escapes.  However, inadvertently, he leads pursuers to the secret cottage and the film's bloody denouement. 

Siodmak's management of violence and suspense sequences is excellent and, in some scenes, he's not inferior to Hitchcock -- although his effects are simpler and more luridly melodramatic.  (The scenes in which the wounded Stevie strung up with skeletal traction awaits the assassins sent by Slim Dundee are similar in effect to Hitchcock's work with the immobilized detective played by Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.)  Siodmak's management of the locations where the film was shot is superlative and memorable.  The Bunker Hill neighborhood with its seedy boarding houses and vertical terrain (we see the Angel's Flight funicular gliding up and down the hillside in the background) is wonderfully evocative.  The Latin-themed night club where much of the action takes place has a curious physiognomy.  It's L-shaped with one long narrow room serving as a sort of low-rent bar frequented by drunks and derelicts.  But this grim space with its deeply plunging perspective opens out onto a dance-hall that's a little bit sordid but more glamorous than the seedy-looking utilitarian tavern full of sad drunks (or completely empty except for the bartender and a female alcoholic during the day).  Siodmak's sense for landscape, city terrain, and the way figures can be deployed against these rotting LA backgrounds is intense and contributes immensely to the action.  The movie is full of strange undercurrents and details.  Thompson's mother denounces Annie.  Thompson rages against his mother but, then, plants a wet kiss on her lips.  Thompson's brother Slade threatens to beat his fiancee who seems to approve of his violence.  Burt Lancaster plays Thompson as a hapless moron -- his eyes are dull and dead-looking and his mouth gapes open idiotically.  Nonetheless, he's verbally abusive and there are long, unpleasant scenes in which Lancaster's character mercilessly hectors Annie, although she seems to enjoy fighting with him as well and gives as good as she gets.  A show-stopping dance scene early in the film features Annie jumping up and down frenetically to percolating jungle music, a barbaric melange of bird cries and warbling flutes played by Esy Morales and his Rhumba band.  Although we can only see him for a few seconds, Annie's dance partner is an uncredited Tony Curtis.  The film is pretty literate with a lot of tough-guy and -gal speeches and, despite its formulaic plot, the movie is full of surprising and unexpected details.  Just about every exterior features a long shot of the brooding downtown Hall of Justice, the big building looming over everything as if to embody the dire fates of the characters in this picture.