In the Cut

 In Jane Campion's grim erotic thriller, In the Cut (2003), women want to be rescued by strong, competent men; there is only one problem, it is these same strong, competent men who pose the very threat from which rescue is needed.  In the Cut is very gloomy, poorly paced, and, even, dull -- it is, however, a work of art that raises certain challenging questions and, for that reason, probably worth enduring.  Re-evaluating this movie, which flopped badly with reviewers and at the box office, contemporary critics observe that Campion's scrupulously feminist vision repudiates the "male gaze" that supposedly configures movies by men and substitutes a woman's way of looking at the world.  I don't know exactly what the "male gaze" is supposed to be and remain skeptical as to whether vision is  gendered.  However, I think I know what is meant by these concepts in the terms of this specific movie; the male gaze is penetrating, acquisitive, voyeuristic and lustful; by contrast, the female gaze is hypervigilant and regards each man as a potential rapist, assailant, or murderer -- as we watch, In the Cut, Campion engineers the movie so that every male figure, without exception, is a potential sex murderer; we flinch every time a man appears.  Of course, in order to make this conceit operable, Campion (and her writer Susanna Moore, the author of the book on which this movie is based) must imagine the female characters as all potential victims.  And this is the film's strategy, a claustrophobic representation of the world as an inferno in which all women are yielding, soft, and compromised by male lust; all men are brutes with only one thing on their minds.  This is a plausible representation of the world, although, of course, radically incomplete and everyone in the movie is portrayed in gender stereotypes that would be truly deplorable if the film weren't so obviously a lurid fantasy.  And, of course, it must be said that there is always some truth to a caricature, otherwise we wouldn't be able to recognize its subject.  

Frannie, played by Megan Ryan, lives in NYC, in the East Village.  She is a schoolteacher working with teenagers and, apparently, writing a book on urban slang.  Frannie lives above a billiard hall that is a very peculiar place -- called The Red Turtle, the pool hall is frequented entirely by Black thugs and their beautiful White girlfriends, who lounge around in evening gowns.  (I think the girls probably are strippers who work in a nearby club and spend their free time shooting pool with their pimps -- but, who knows?  Nothing makes much sense about the film's physical environs.) It's post 9-11, and there are flags hanging everywhere, banners that Campion shoots against urban ruins and filth with an ironic and jaundiced eye.  Frannie has a half-sister -- the girls' father was married four times -- and this young woman lives above a strip tease club where she also seems to work, possibly as a bartender or waitress; we don't ever see her on-stage  As in Martin Scorsese's great After Hours, there's trouble in this Soho neighborhood; the cops keep finding body-arts of "disarticulated" young women in the alleyways and gardens -- in fact, a head has been found dropped in the garden behind Frannie's house.  

After spending the night with her half-sister, Pauline (played by a pouting Jennifer Jason Leigh), Frannie goes with one of her students to the Red Turtle pool hall, apparently to discuss a paper that she has assigned to the young Black student with whom she is flirting.  The boy comes on a bit strong and so Frannie to escape from him goes into the basement to the toilet.  The basement is a house of horrors, dank, dark, and full of concealing shadows.  Frannie sees a man receiving oral sex from a young woman; implausibly, she's not able to see his face, but detects a black 3 of Spades tattoo on his forearm.  Later, she is confronted by an aggressive detective and his obnoxious partner  investigating the serial killing and mutilation of local prostitutes. The detective, Malloy (Mark Ruffalo), rudely interrogates her, insults her as well and, then, asks her out.  The guy is so obnoxious that no one in their right mind would give him the time of day -- but Frannie thinks he's cute and he exudes cocky rescuer vibes, and, so, of course, she agrees to meet him for a drink.  At the bar, the cop's even more nasty partner shows up drunk and the detectives take turns making vicious misogynistic remarks, hugging and kissing one another in rather strange displays of male bonding, and, then, insulting her some more.  Needless to say Frannie flees the encounter only to be groped and mugged on the street by a man in a ski-mask and black jogging suit.  (The streets are filthy, often wet with floating garbage, and decorated with obscene and sinister graffiti -- the city is like Scorsese's inferno in Taxi Driver.)  Malloy, the sexist detective, interviews her at her apartment, where, one thing leading to another, he ends up performing cunnilingus on our heroine a tergo and, then, has some spectacular intercourse with her --this scene is protracted, involves very cringeworthy dialogue (Malloy learned his oral sex skills from an older woman called "the chicken lady"), and features lots of very explicit full frontal nudity, both male and female.  We have earlier seen Frannie masturbating to her memories of the first encounter with this cop, a perfect specimen of toxic masculinity, and, so, we know that he makes her really hot.  (Frannie violates her own advice to poor Pauline; Pauline has been ghosted by her doctor that she has slept with and is stalking the physician.  Frannie says that she should just masturbate and not have sex with every guy that she desires.)  Frannie and Malloy's sexual encounters are entangled with the police investigation of the serial killings and the plot assigns suspicion to every man that appears:  Frannie's previous boyfriend, who also dresses in scrubs as a doctor (but I think he's just acting the part in a soap opera) is stalking her, breaks into apartment and constantly threatens her -- at one point, he suggests he'll kill his nasty little terrier-chihuahua mix if she doesn't come around to having sex with him again.  Frannie's student is writing an essay on the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, whom he proclaims to be innocent, writing the paper in his own blood.  (Later this kid comes to see Frannie who obligingly necks with him but, then, flees in horror when he takes the cue and tries to rape her.)  Frannie's sister, Pauline, gets butchered.  Frannie cradles Pauline's severed head, concealed in a plastic grocery sack, and ends up being interrogated by the awful detectives.  There's nothing like a decapitation of close family member to get the juices flowing.  Frannie decides to have sex with Malloy and handcuffs him to a convenient nearby stanchion in her apartment.  She accuses Malloy of murdering her sister -- he inexplicably has her room key (suggesting that Malloy and Pauline are also sexually involved).  Also, Malloy has part of Frannie's charm bracelet, a domestic piece of jewelry featuring a wedding cake, a little cottage, and a silver perambulator with infant inside.  This seems to be a souvenir that Malloy has taken to commemorate his sexual interludes with Frannie, but she interprets this as further evidence that he may be the serial killer, hence, the handcuffs. (Frannie has also seen that Malloy has the 3 of Spades seen previously in cellar of the Red Turtle tattooed on his forearm.)  After some more garish sex between the handcuffed Malloy and Frannie, the real murdered pays a call and the film is set up for its gruesome climax.  (Of course, Malloy can't rescue Frannie this time because he is hors de combat due to the handcuffs.  Pleading to be released from the cuffs, Malloy says:  "Get me out of this. I'm starting to feel like a chick.")  If this seems ridiculous, it is.  However, it also must be said that the more serious a film is about sex, the more ridiculous -- consider, for instance, Last Tango in Paris.  And this film is no rom-com -- it's in deadly earnest with respect to sex and gender.   (Campion explored this same subject in greater detail and with much more sophistication in her New Zealand mini-series shown between 2013 and 2017, Top of the Lake, an excellent crime show featuring both toxic masculinity and equally poisonous female characters.)

Campion's filmmaking is impeccable.  The movie is shot in very tense,  jittery style with quick cutting.  Campion edits on motion and, so, the act of someone sitting down may be fractured into three cubist-style shots.  The surface of the film is turgid, congested, full of digressive images that appear as if only half-glimpsed.  An example is a twitchy subway scene (of which there are many) in which we see two men carrying a huge round bouquet of flowers labeled "MOM" -- at first, the big red wheel seems inexplicable but, then, we realize that it is a funeral wreath. Cityscapes shot over the rooftops contain pointless reframing motions, little jerks and hitches, and New York is a hellscape full of shadowy villains, pimps, and hookers standing in dirty puddles of water.  The bravura pictorial style and razor-sharp cutting conceals the film's shallow thesis (all women are masochistic victims, all men abusive rapists) and gives the picture an eerie gravitas that the pulp plot doesn't really merit.  As an example of the movie's pervasive darkness, the action is interspersed with sepia silent film shots of Victorian men and women skating on ice in a snowstorm -- Campion's sense of time is blurry; given the age of her characters the courtship of Franny's mother as shown in the silent film inserts would have taken place around 1965; but the point, I think, is valid:  we perceive of our parent's youth and courtship as existing in a storied, half-mythological "before-time" and this is reflected in the herky-jerky pastiche of silent film used to depict the ice-skating scenes.  Franny's apartment is stifling and she falls asleep leaning against her open refrigerator door.  In her dream, she sees her parents' courtship on the ice which ends with her father's ice skates first cutting off her mother's feet and, then, slicing through her neck.  (When the film's title, "In the Cut" is flashed on screen, Franny's father makes a sudden turn on the frozen lake and we hear the blades of the skates cutting deeo into the ice.)

I always watch the credits.  The movie was made entirely in New York City, probably about a year after the Twin Towers were destroyed.  In the "Thank You" credit, thanks are given to Gwyneth Paltrow and Harvey Weinstein.  

  

Oppenheimer

 Here is the plot of Oppenheimer (2023):  a gruff general (played by Matt Damon) recruits a Jewish physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer to work on the government's project to build an atomic bomb.  (The German's. who are ravaging Europe, are said to be two years ahead of the Americans in this desperate arm's race.) For some inexplicable reason, Oppenheimer with his brother, Frank, own a ranch near Santa Fe, at a place called Los Alamos.  A makeshift town is constructed in that place.  Oppenheimer with his scientists and technicians successfully engineer and build the bomb.  The weapon is successfully tested and, then, dropped on Japan at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,  During the project, Oppenheimer, who is quite articulate, mocked a bureaucrat named Lewis Strauss -- the slur had something to do with acquiring isotopes from Norway or Sweden.  After the War, Strauss takes revenge by conspiring with others to deny Oppenheimer renewal of his security clearance -- this involves a contested quasi-judicial hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission.  Oppenheimer's wife and some of his colleagues then retaliate by humiliating Strauss when he seeks confirmation to the cabinet position of Secretary of Commerce.  Strauss is denied confirmation.  Oppenheimer, now old, is given a testimonial honor by the President.  The substance of a conversation that Oppenheimer had with Albert Einstein at Princeton many years earlier is finally revealed in the penultimate scenes in the movie.  The picture is three hours and seventeen minutes long.

Christopher Nolan who directed Oppenheimer seems to have sensed that this plot told chronologically isn't very interesting and, indeed, completely devoid of drama.  We know that the atomic bomb worked and that it didn't devour the atmosphere and burn the planet up as Edward Teller, another physicist thought might happen.  We know how the War turned out and the argumentative proceedings involving Oppenheimer's security clearance and, then, Strauss' confirmation hearing are utterly devoid of interest; these bureaucratic problems are the very definition of an anti-climax but they are the film's focus in its last hour and, indeed, most of the movie pivots around these scenes.  Nolan compensates for the very thin and inconsequential aspects of the narrative but devising an elaborate system of flash-backs and flashforwards further decked out in showy imagery of huge fireballs exploding, black holes sucking stars into their guts, molecules spinning around in their orbits, boiling plasma and other visually spectacular, but hollow, special effects that have nothing to do with the story and that merely punctuate the several hundred short scenes, mostly randomly shuffled in time and space, that make up the movie.  Everyone runs around in a frantic way with the camera chasing after them or panning ahead of them as in TV shows like The West Wing.  Oppenheimer always looks very worried as do most of his colleagues -- of course, they are frightening by the booming Dolby soundtrack and constant blasts and fireballs interpolated into the film. There are probably eighty or so speaking parts and most viewers will have no idea who is talking or making points at various moments in the movie.  Nolan, who wrote the script, seems to understand what is happening, but most people in the audience will have no idea what is going on.  (I saw the movie with a baffled group of senior citizens who were aware of the movie's rave reviews and diligently watched up the bitter end -- but when the closing titles rolled, these folks ran for the exits as fast as possible.)  It's very hard to care about the bureaucratic conflicts in the film's last hour -- the best response, I suppose, is a shrug of the shoulders; that is, who cares?  

All of the scenes in the film are very effectively staged and the explosion of A-Bomb when tested is impressive, but completely devoid of any real suspense.  The acting is uniformly superb.  The viewer believes that the various belligerent military men, venal politicians, and nerdy scientists shown in the movie are accurately portrayed.  Cillian Murphy, in particular, looks very much like the real Oppenheimer and cuts a striking and enigmatic figure on the screen -- he paces around in fedora, rail-thin, and always smoking a cigarette.  We have no idea what motivates him, an aspect of the movie sometimes proclaimed to be one of the film's strengths -- but this is making lemonades out of lemons; there is nothing in the picture remotely as striking as, let's say, George C. Scott's portrayal of General Patton.  In fact, Oppenheimer's mysterious motivations, seemingly shifting from scene to scene, evidence laziness on the part of the screenwriter -- Nolan has substituted enigma for revelation of character.  (An example of the screenwriter's negligence is a revelation about twenty minutes before the end of the movie that Oppenheimer is having a sexual affair with an attractive blonde that he we see him chatting up at a few parties earlier in the picture -- this affair is used as evidence of Oppenheimer's moral turpitude, but we don't know what's going on until someone brings up the issue in one of the interminable hearing scenes near the end of the picture.)  In fact, Oppenheimer's real offense seems to be that he was a Communist or actually "fellow traveler" if not a card-carrying commie in the thirties and he imprudently supported petitions to unionize lab workers and professional physicists and other scientists, surely a quixotic objective,  also around the time of the early forties.  (Oppenheimer's wife, Kitty was an actual Communist until 1936 and when she is belabored on this point, she gives the chief prosecutor the "what for" with her quick-witted and biting riposte to this line of questioning.  She's portrayed aa much more savvy and aggressive than the rather dim-witted Oppenheimer who is depicted as a a political naif.  Kitty has reason to be bitter in this film; Oppenheimer was apparently a compulsive womanizer and he has another girlfriend who looks a lot like Kitty (except she's often shown bare-breasted) who kills herself at some point, causing great distress to the hero and, even, greater distress to poor Kitty when he mopes around mourning his mistress' demise.  Most of the film is a confusing jigsaw puzzle with its fractured chronology and it seems that more than a few fragments of the puzzle have been left out of the film.  I have to confess that I was unable to work up any real interest in Oppenheimer's torments after the War.  There's an epigraph that says that Prometheus (the movie is based on a book called American Prometheus) was tormented for bringing fire to humans by having his liver perpetually chewed out by an eagle.  Oppenheimer is tortured by being subjected to petty machinations by bickering bureaucrats like Strauss (played well by Robert Downey, Jr.) -- this is hardly much in the way of torment.  Some aspects of the movie are ridiculously inept from a technical standpoint.  At the climax of the scenes involving the fight over Oppenheimer's security clearance, Nolan ramps up the volume of the soundtrack to a point so that you can't understand what anyone is saying -- although this is supposed to be the high point of administrative procedure scenes.  He even dissolves everything in a brilliant flare of white light, simulating the blast of the A-Bomb.  Why?  I presume it's because nothing of any significance is really happening in these scenes and Nolan has to create a false climax for something that is otherwise inconsequential.   

In an early scene in the movie, Oppenheimer speaks to Albert Einstein at Princeton,  Seemingly Einstein gives him some mysterious advice and, then, stalks off to the dismay of Strauss, a fellow Jew, who would like his two protegees to make nice with one another.  The movie frequently reverts to this scene and we are led to wonder what exactly Einstein told Oppenheimer that was so meaningful and portentous.  At the end of the movie, we learn that Einstein told our hero that, one day, he would be invited to a testimonial dinner, praised insincerely, and, then, given some kind of meaningless award.  And we see this happen in the movie's last five minutes.  But so what?  Again, the reaction is shrug one's shoulders -- this is the tiny mouse that this huge, expensive mountain of a movie has given birth to.  Recognizing that this revelation is totally anti-climactic, Nolan stages an impressive scene of missiles streaking through the atmosphere and Teller's H-Bombs exploding all over the planet while a serrated saw of bright red fire eats through the earth.  When you've got nothing meaningful to say, go ahead and stage a gratuitous (if impressive) scene of the end of the world.   For the last six months, the Internet has been buzzing with the word that Oppenheimer is the greatest film of the 21st century -- everyone has praised the movie as fantastically moving and brilliant.  But this is all hype.  The critics are wrong.  Oppenheimer is very beautifully made but its emotionally incoherent and way, way too long and confusing -- most of it is not at all memorable.  The acting is superb and dialogue is wonderfully designed but the movie doesn't seem to be about anything of interest.  If the picture were ninety minutes long I might be able to cautiously recommend it.  But this thing goes on for over three-hours and its very very loud -- I know the A-Bomb went boom in a big way, but the picture is punishing both on the ears and the mind.  It's a depressing failure and, since my hopes were elevated walking into the theater, ruined my weekend. 

One False Move

 I saw Carl Franklin's One False Move around 1992.  The film was originally planned as a "straight-to-video" picture and cost less than 2 million dollars.  Although the movie had a brief theatrical release, I saw the picture on video,  The movie had distinctive qualities and I recall several scenes, particularly the blood bath in the beginning and the wounded policeman's conversation with a little boy, impressed me to the extent that vivid memories of these sequences have remained with me for more than thirty years.  But the film soon became hard to access, wasn't shown on cable as far as I know, and I began to wonder if the picture had the merit that I had accorded to it when I saw the movie for the first and only time many years ago.  Criterion agrees with me that One False Move is a remarkable and unique film and has re-released the picture in a deluxe remastered form with, of course, various extras including a commentary by the director and the one of the screenwriters Billy Bob Thornton.  The film is not exactly as good as I remembered it, but very entertaining and, also, well, if unobtrusively, crafted.  The picture remains impressive, although some of the racial issues that it explores, have now been addressed so extensively a bit of the film's novelty has worn off.  The acting is superb and the picture, a neo-noir that morphs into a kind of Western, is very suspenseful and gripping.

The film's narrative invokes various genre conventions.  Two criminals brutally murder a rival gang of drug dealers in LA and go on the lam.  One of the crooks is a repressed, hyper-disciplined criminal mastermind, although with a propensity for sadistically murdering folks with a knife -- this is Pluto played impassively by Michael Beach.  The other criminal Ray (acted by Billie Bob Thornton) is an impulsive psychopath, not too smart, who is controlled by his moll, a call-girl and junkie named Fantasia (Cynda Williams).  In Mayberry RFD, here a place called Star City, Arkansas, the police chief named Dale "Hurricane" Dixon holds sway -- this role is played by Bill Paxton in a remarkable performance that channels Andy Griffith, Barney Fife, but, also, the tough cowboy lawmen played by actors like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart.  The bad guys, fleeing cross-country, are on a course for Star City -- Fantasia has family there (at home she's called Lila) and she wants to see her five-year old son.  Two cynical LA detectives, a white dude and a saturnine black cop, are dispatched to Star City to intercept the villains.  As the reader will observe, every character in this picture is a variant on a stereotype of one sort or another -- the earnest, well-meaning, and naive rural cop, the African-American and White city boy cops, the misguided and beautiful young girl entrapped by her relationship to the psychotically violent Ray, and the imperturbable but vicious criminal mastermind.  The audience is lulled into a sense that this is familiar territory with a final showdown inevitable.  And, in fact, the picture delivers on its genre premises -- the bad guys kill various hapless interlopers during their flight cross-country; the rural cop is outmatched by the savage criminals but has to duel them in the end; and the crook's moll is conflicted, sometimes sympathetic, and, sometimes, callously violent as well.  The film's surprising turn is that the Hurricane Dixon apparently had some kind of sexual affair with Fantasia when she was a 17-year old virgin back in Star City and a little mixed race boy that we see in the company of her brother and mother in Arkansas is, in fact, his child.  Dixon was married when he dallied with Lila (Fantasia) but he and his wife seem to have resolved to put that unpleasant interlude behind them.  Dixon doesn't acknowledge the child, although the little boy lives in his tiny town; in fact, he has a little girl of his own with his somewhat staid and religious White wife. 

The film crosscuts effectively between the depredations committed by the fleeing criminals and Star City where the LA cops work with Dixon to investigate Lila's connections with her kin in town.  Dixon is a well-meaning guy, very gung ho, and casually racist, something that doesn't seem to offend the Black detective from LA too much.  Dixon admires the LA detectives and, even, proposes that after the bust is made in this case, that he go to LA and work with them as a "team" -- as his wife sardonically notes, Dixon "watches too many cop-shows on TV."  The LA police patronize Dixon and, generally, regard him as a clown, although they begrudgingly acknowledge his rapport with the people in town and his ability to de-escalate violent encounters with local shit-heads (to use police diction).  (In one scene, Dixon wrestles a local wife-beater to the ground and, then, talks the man into sleeping it off; the wife or girlfriend demands that the drunk pay for her window which has been broken in the wrestling match with Dixon.  The LA cops watch this confrontation with guns drawn and one expects that if they were managing the encounter the drunk would have ended up dead -- as far as Dixon is concerned, the guy is just a nuisance with a bad temper when he's drinking.  As the film progresses, the villains leave a trail of corpses behind them and, ultimately, have to separate after another massacre in Houston.  Lila takes a Greyhound to Star City, disembarking from the bus at a crossroads in a cornfield where a crop duster is zooming back and forth, an obvious reference to North by Northwest.  In a house on the outskirts of town, Lila confronts Dixon who has come to ambush the bad guys whom he knows are on their way to meet her in Star City.  We learn that Lila had a White father and that she feels that Dixon sexually exploited her when he busted her for shoplifting -- he seems to have released her on the basis of their sexual encounter.  "Why did you have to fuck with me?" Lila says and there's the sense that this episode forced her out of town to LA where things haven't gone too well for her.  Lila has seen her five-year old son at the house on the edge of town and the LA cops roust her brother who denies that he took the little boy out to the hide-out.  (A couple of men hunting bullfrogs to fry up their legs, however, have seen the man with the little boy driving out to the hide-out early in the morning).  As the LA cops with the little boy desperately hunt for the hide-out, the bad guys arrive at the house and shoot it out with Dixon.  Badly wounded, Dixon lies on the driveway in front of the house.  His son by Lila gets out of the squad car in the confusion and asks him why he's bleeding.  "I got in fight," the injured police chief says.  He's talking to the child to distract him from the carnage a few feet away.  The little boy notices his key chain.  "Why do you have so many keys?" he asks.  "I lock things up," Dixon replies.  

The movie was Franklin's first picture and there are some missteps:  the final showdown is signaled by portentous imagery: characters are dynamically framed using tilted (canted) shots; an old man plays a mournful lick on his harmonica, filmed from below so that his form is aggressively foreshortened, like something you might see on baroque trompe l'oeil ceiling; Franklin cuts back and forth between the combatants rushing into battle and non-combatants at home, a kind of editing that D. W. Griffith invented as early as 1909 in A Corner in Wheat and the labor riot scenes in Intolerance (1916).  The effect here is incongruent with the film's otherwise sober mise-en-scene and seems excessively melodramatic -- it's like an eruption of the more extreme choreography in a spaghetti Western, for instance, something by Sergio Leone, in the midst of a film notable for its realism.  But the final gun battle is nicely staged, both brutal and thematically driven.  The rural landscapes with dirt roads ending in refuse dumps and rickety bridges over turgid ponds and streams are intensely imagined and Star City exists in a coherent space that is effectively represented.  The characters are all deeply flawed and this contributes to the film's appeal -- although the plot is generic and builds steadily to the final shoot-out, the protagonists seem like real people:  Lila has been badly damaged by Dixon's intervention in her life and, although she struggles to be decent, she seems to be a cocaine-addicted whore with an impulsive violent streak.  Dixon is a big fish in a small pond, the kind of small-town hero who afflicts places like Star City -- we get a glimpse into his casual corruption when he is showing off for the LA cops; after breakfast, he leaves a ten dollar bill telling the waitress to keep the change -- but, as she points out, the charges are 12 dollars and he's just using his influence to beat the cafe out of some money.  Nonetheless, we feel sorry for him when he comes into the cafe later and hears the two LA detectives, whom he idolizes, mocking him -- this scene of a pretentious character getting his comeuppance when hears accidentally what people really feel about him is also a genre convention; this sort of thing occurs in about half of the old Andy Griffith series shows.  John Carpenter said that he wanted to establish that the bad guys in his first film Assault on Precinct 13 were, in fact, really bad and so he had the villain shoot a little girl in the face through her ice-cream cone.  Franklin is slightly more subtle, but not much -- he has the bad guys butcher six people in the opening scene, cutting them up with knives or suffocating them under plastic sacks tied over their faces; the ultra-violence in the first ten minutes, caused by Fantasia's treachery, is so severe that a lot of people walked out of the first screening of this movie -- but it's arguably necessary to establish the sense of brooding menace that underlies most of the film. Of course, the contrast between city and country is central to the movie -- the White detective from LA says that he's "just a country boy"; when the Black cop questions him about this, the cop says that he was raised in Malibu.  

Film study note: Sir Carol Reed and Outcast of the Islands

 

1.  

Carol Reed, 1906 - 1976 (pronouns: he, him, his)

2.

Charles Dickens queered me on Carol Reed.  Reed directed a movie musical Oliver! based on the novel by Charles Dickens Oliver Twist.  The picture was released in 1968 to great acclaim.  Reed was awarded the Oscar for Best Director.  (Yes, the title of Reed’s movie has an exclamation point.)

One of the first serious novels that I read was Dicken’s Oliver Twist.  I think I read the novel when I was about 10.  My brother, a year younger than me, read the novel after I had finished it and we discussed the book in great detail.  

I recall that the book involved grim descriptions of child abuse and violence.  It was a serious novel in which bad things happened to good people.  Bill Sikes beats the prostitute, Nancy, to death.  A mob pursues Fagin.  Sikes dies when swinging from a rope that loops around his neck and strangles him.  I thought that the musical Oliver! was a travesty of the book and despised it.  As a result, I dismissed Carol Reed as an uninteresting hack-director, a man with neither intelligence, nor taste.  

3.

Carol Reed made three movies that are universally acclaimed.  Odd Man Out (1947), The Fallen Idol (1948), and The Third Man (1949).  Outcast of the Islands, based on Joseph Conrad’s second novel of the same name, was released 1952.  At the time of its first screening, Outcast of the Islands was dismissed by most critics and, later, said to mark a turning point in Reed’s directorial career.  From that film, it was said to be all downhill.  

But I’m not sure.  And beginning in the mid-seventies, the film was revived and re-evaluated by no less formidable critics than David Thomson and Pauline Kael, both of whom declared that the picture was far better than its reputation.   

Reed was the son of a famous late Victorian (and Edwardian) actor and theater manager, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree.  He was one of six illegitimate children that Tree fathered on his mistress Beatrice May Pinney.  His parents were both striking figures and Reed was the epitome of debonair stylishness.  Very handsome himself, he acted in theater for a few years and, then, migrated into directing both for the stage and movies.  Reed was exceptionally well-educated and a quick study and he did his apprentice work with a number of Britain’s best directors of the pre-war period, particularly Thorold Dickinson (who made a startling version of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades after the War).  After directing some “quota quickies”, low budget films made to meet government quotas imposed to combat Hollywood influence in the UK, Reed was granted the opportunity to work on some prestige films, and, by all accounts, distinguished himself.  The World War intervened and Reed worked in the military psychiatric department, producing several documentaries in support of the war effort.  After the war, he made the three films on which his current fame rests one after another, producing a picture a year.  

Odd Man Out (1947) was shot largely on location in West Belfast.  The picture involves an IRA gunman who is wounded in a gun-battle with the police.  The gunman, Johnny McQueen, flees through the night-time streets of Belfast, pursued by a tightening dragnet.  James Mason played Johnny and the film was both critically acclaimed and a box-office hit.  (The movie has many admirers: Roman Polanski claimed the picture inspired him to become a film-maker; figures as disparate as Gore Vidal and Sam Peckinpah have proclaimed that the movie is perfectly made.)  Reed’s next movie was the most popular British film released in 1948, The Fallen Idol.  The movie boasts a script by Graham Greene adapting one of his short stories.  A young boy comes to suspect that the family’s butler, whom he idealizes, has committed a murder.  Critics say that the picture is one of the best movies ever made about a child.  The Fallen Idol features Ralph Richardson and Jack Hawkins.  

In the United States, Reed is best known for The Third Man, a film released in 1949 and famously starring Orson Welles as the sinister Harry Lime.  Shot on location in the post-war ruins of Vienna, the film is noteworthy for its hellish sewer sequences and Lime’s famous speech delivered on the Ferris Wheel at the Prater Amusement Park, a soliloquy in which the villain extols war and chaos as being essential to human creativity.  Joseph Cotton is also featured in the movie produced by David O. Selznick.  Once upon a time, the movie’s soundtrack, featuring a skittery zither theme, was iconic.  It’s generally agreed that The Third Man is the best film noir ever made by a British director.  

Outcast of the Islands is an ambitious production filmed in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and at Shepperton Studios.  Alexander Korda produce the movie.   Released in 1951, the movie has the best cast that Reed was ever able to assemble: Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, Robert Morley, and Wendy Hillier.  Highly acclaimed when it was released, the picture went into eclipse for many years, argued to be the film on which Reed’s career foundered.  After this picture, it was alleged that Reed’s work was all down-hill although he made a number of other movies, some of them well-regarded: Trapeze (1956) was produced Burt Lancaster’s production company and starred the actor; it’s a circus picture.  A Kid for Two Farthings (1955) is another small-scale but delicately made movie about children – it’s set in London’s Jewish community.  Working again with Graham Greene, Reed directed Our Man in Havana, a good thriller released in 1959.   Reed was hired to direct the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty but couldn’t tolerate Marlon Brando’s antics on the set and was fired from the production (Lewis Milestone finished the picture).  Reed’s brilliant depiction of Sambir, the Borneo village where the action is set, and the sailing scenes in Outcast of the Islands seem to have recommended the director to the producers of the big-budget Mutiny on the Bounty  – but Brando’s dissolute obstructionist approach to the movie was intolerable to Reed, who was, after all, a knight of the realm.  After that Reed directed the big-budget picture The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), a huge self-important production with Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison – the movie flopped.  Reed ended his career with the movie musical Oliver! featuring his nephew Oliver Reed in the roll of Bill Sykes.  The movie won lots of awards but it’s largely inert.

Only two British film-directors were knighted: Sir Alexander Korda and Sir Carol Reed.  

4.

Outcast of the Islands adapts to the screen Joseph Conrad’s novel of similar name.  Conrad’s book, An Outcast of the Islands, was published in 1896, fifty-five years before it was made into a movie.  It is interesting to consider that this would be equivalent today to producing a movie based on a book written in 1968.  I was alive in 1968 and recall events in that year.  I suppose the same could be said as to 1896 for many people who might have seen this picture in 1952 when it was released.  (Books published in 1968 were Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Darkness, Updike’s Couples, and William Gass’ short story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.)

An Outcast of the Islands is Conrad’s second novel.  It is also the second book in Conrad’s series now called “The Lindgard Trilogy”.  These three books all involve a character named Captain Tom Lindgard, renowned as an exemplary British sea captain.  (This figure is based on William Lindgard who lived from 1829 to 1888 – the real Lindgard explored many of the islands and waters in Malaysia and was one of the first sea captains to exploit the Berau River as access to the interior of Borneo, an important plot element in Outcast of the Islands.  He was known as “the King of the Sea.”) The first book in the Lindgard trilogy is Almayer’s Folly, also Conrad’s first novel, published 1895.  This book was successful and was followed by a prequel, An Outcast of the Islands, the story of an Eastern River in which the story takes place twelve to fifteen years before the events narrated in Almayer’s Folly.  Twenty-four years later, Conrad completed the trilogy with a prequel to the prequel, The Rescue published in 1920.  The Rescue is a sort of origin story and depicts Captain Lindgard as a young man.  Almayer’s Folly's depicts Lindgard as an old man. 

Almayer’s Folly, until the last thirty years considered an apprentice work by Conrad, is about the Dutch trader, Kasper Almayer who has spent many years of his life searching in vain for gold mines said to be hidden in Borneo’s interior.  (At that time, there were still headhunters in the jungles of Borneo.)  Almayer’s “folly” is his obsessive love for his beautiful daughter Nina.  (In more prosaic terms, his “folly” is his grandiose house in the rain forest.)  Almayer dreams of his daughter becoming a great lady in Europe, but is thwarted when she falls in love with a Balinese prince. Nina is “half-caste”, that is, half Dutch and half Malayan.  Her Malayan mother, Almayer’s wife despises her European husband and conspires with her daughter to defeat Almayer’s objective to install Nina as a Dutch socialite.  When he learns that Nina has eloped into the forest with the native prince, Almayer burns down his pretentious home and becomes an opium addict.  

Almayer’s Folly is over-written, poorly paced, and turgid with passages of purple prose.  It is also surprisingly modern in that it features two women empowered to defeat the male protagonist who represents the imperialist order – Almayer’s wife acts on motives of revenge; Nina acts on the basis of her love for the native ruler.  Perhaps, it is not so curious that Chantel Akerman, the Belgian feminist film-maker, made a notable version of Almayer’s Folly released in 2011 – I thought it odd that Akerman would choose to adapt Conrad for this elaborate, and expensive, period piece, but, on seeing the film, I recognize many of the director’s signature themes in the picture.  (There is a Malaysian film version of the novel as well.)

A year later, Conrad published An Outcast of the Islands, also deemed to be one of the writer’s lesser works and, in some ways, a sketch for his much more acclaimed novella “The Heart of Darkness.”  (Both books involve a European protagonist seduced and destroyed by a native woman.)  

An Outcast of the Islands also involves Almayer, his Malay wife, and Nina.  The book, like Almayer’s Folly, is set in Sambir.  Sambir stands in for a real place Tanjung Redeb on the Berau River in Borneo.  As with Almayer’s Folly, the book has been recently re-evaluated on the basis of its heroine, Aissa, a character whom post-colonialist critics interpret as a proto-feminist who has agency and acts to destroy the hapless and corrupt Willem, allegorized in these readings as a symbol for imperialist exploitation.  As previously noted, Almayer, Nina, and his wife are a decade or more younger than the characters in Almayer’s Folly.  To some degree, Outcast of the Islands depicts the events that led to Almayer’s loss of his trading station, a misadventure that drove him to his hopeless search of gold in the island’s interior.  

The Rescue, A Romance of the Shallows published in 1920 shows the young Tom Lingard in love.  The book is a “sea story” set in the Malay archipelago and replete with flotillas of canoes, native rebellions, pirates, and the like.  It was highly regarded when first reviewed but, then, mostly forgotten for many years.  Now, with a revival of interest in the politics of empire (and sexual politics), the book has won many new readers.  If all three books are read together, as a single work, the trilogy is said to be a penetrating study of the nature and sensibility of the colonialist enterprise.  

Conrad is an essential writer with respect to his depictions of imperialism.  Chinua Achebe’s scathing essay on the racism implicit in “The Heart of Darkness” has cast some of Conrad’s works into disrepute.  However, as is often the case, efforts are being made to rehabilitate the writer and restore his reputation, Most recently, those efforts have focused on the Lindgard Trilogy.   

5.

In some ways, Reed’s version of Conrad’s novel is better crafted and more tightly constructed than the book.  Reed eliminate some unpleasant racial elements by avoiding Conrad’s theme of miscegenation.  (See notes below).  He eliminates Conrad’s melodramatic and risible climax and ends the tale where Conrad should have cut his losses and ended as well.  The confrontation between Lingard and Willems is the emotional core of the book and it would have been well for Conrad to not have engineered the melodramatic finale.  (By contrast, Conrad’s last chapter, an epilogue of sorts, is very well done and moving – but its valedictory and would be difficult to visualize in film.)  Complications in the novel’s plot involving the status of Omar, Aissa, and their people involve lots of dialogue between the villagers and the pirate clan embedded in their midst (Omar’s elderly brigands); this chatter which is written in formal, quasi-Biblical diction is irritating and hard to follow.  

Movies have to show and not tell.  Conrad’s prose is intended to occlude understanding in some respects – his focus is psychological and his primary interest is how people with bad motives persuade themselves that they are not acting badly but, even, somehow virtuously when committing their crimes.  This is Conrad’s essential criticism of imperialism; the English masters, who are really just thieves, have developed elaborate and hypocritical theories, most untethered to reality, to justify their crimes.  This theme is particularly apparent in “The Heart of Darkness”, the one text by Conrad that everyone knows – ultimately, Conrad’s books about the colonies involve elaborate inner monologues which are actually obfuscation; they conceal the true and venal wellsprings of action under an ornate veneer of overcharged and melodramatic rhetoric.  Conrad’s reader is often left in the dark, motivations for actions hidden under layers of self-justificatory rhetoric.  It is not surprising that Henry James was a great admirer of Conrad’s prose fiction.  When I read An Outcast of the Islands, I found that I generally didn’t know exactly what was going on – Conrad’s prose is dense, sticky, suffocating.  There’s no firm ground; in the confrontation scene with Lingard, the monsoon rains drown everything and Willems feels himself literally sinking into the swamp.  By contrast, Reed’s characters are clearly delineated and their actions made both distinct and visible.  When the monsoon rains pour down at the climax, Lingard and Willems confront one another among great stone ridges and domes.  The ground doesn’t sink away as it does in Conrad’s description of the encounter.  In general, Reed substitutes rock for Conrad’s swampy terrain.  The best example of this is the unconvincing, if fairy-tale, montage showing the sailing ship navigating among massive and formidable rock formations.  Reed imagines the difficulties of reaching the river and Borneo’s interior, the secret sea passage, in terms of giant cliffs and submerged reefs with black serrated edges.  Conrad’s account of these difficulties is very different: the real Berau river, flowing down from Borneo’s highlands, fissions into a hundred channels in a swampy delta.  Only one of those channels is deep enough to be successfully navigated by a trading ship.  In Conrad, the hazard to the vessel is not that it will be run aground on savage-looking rocks, but that it will founder in swamps and sandbars in bath-warm tropical waters too shallow for navigation.

6.

It is often said that if Reed had died after making The Third Man or after completing Outcast of the Islands, he would be regarded as one of film history’s greatest directors.  As it was, Reed continued making movies with ever diminishing success until the final travesty of Oliver! for which he was reliably, according to Hollywood custom, awarded an Oscar.  Old directors are given Oscars of this kind as reward for going away.  Reed didn’t exactly go away – he made two more pictures which are said to be execrable.  

On the basis of this melancholy history, Reed’s reputation is that he got lucky in the second half of the forties when he was able to collaborate with other first-rate talents – Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in The Third Man, the all-star cast in Outcast of the Island, Graham Greene as scenarist for The Fallen Idol and so on.  (I think the astonishing Odd Man Out, a truly visionary film, gives the lie to this theory – Reed gets a superb performance out of James Mason, but he is the only star in the movie; the rest of the company are all Irish character actors recruited from Dublin’s Abbey Theater; Graham Greene noodled around on the script for Odd Man Out based on a 1945 novel by another, forgotten writer, but, in the end, couldn’t make the material cohere and the script is credited to another man, like the novelist of the source also now forgotten.)  The truth is that Carol Reed’s name is on these films and they are his work; I have recently watched several of them and all are stylistically and thematically related.  

The production of Outcast of the Island in London and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) was apparently vexed.  Freddy Francis (D.P for David Lynch’s The Elephant Man among other notable pictures) was a camera operator on the film.  He described the shoot as miserable and said that Carol Reed was ovewhelmingly “dour” and completely humorless.  That said, Outcast of the Islands is efficiently made, fast paced, and brilliantly shot in a discordant combination of styles that includes documentary footage of Sambir village and its inhabitants and spectacular chiaroscuro that seems derived from Murnau’s South Seas’ romance Tabu and some of Joseph von Sternberg’s more exotic sequences in his cycle of films featuring Marlene Dietrich such as The Devil is a Woman and The Scarlet Empress.  The movie is carefully constructed with parallel characters.  Who is the titular “outcast”?  Obviously, Willems, but, of course, Aissa’s love for Willems renders her an outcast at the end of the movie and the little boy in the dug-out who stalks Willems in the village sequences is also an “outcast”, a “canoe boy” said to belong to no one.  Reed deploys different editing styles as well – he uses Soviet-era montage for the sailing scenes among the rocks and, then, deploys a system of cuts that emphasizes characters gazing at one another:  Mrs. Almayer (Wendy Hillier) stares at Willems, Willems stares at Aissa, the children and the canoe boy survey Willems and taunt them, Robert Morley is constantly observing Willems for evidence of perfidy.  The two characters outside of this editing pattern of people watching other people are Aissa and Lingard. (Omar, Aissa’s pirate father is also an exception to this editing scheme; he is totally blind.) The manly Lingard gazes straight into the eyes of those that he encounters.  Aissa, by contrast, never looks at anyone directly – she always stares out of the corners of her eyes, simultaneously showing deference, but, also, a kind of cunning – she is either a predatory animal or prey.  (The exception is the frightening scene in which Aissa seizes Mrs. Almayer during the riot at the trading post and threatens to strangle her – in this scene, she gazes triumphantly out at the camera, looking straight ahead for one of the only times that we see her gaze outward in his movie.)  The village is very much an organism and character in the film; the elaborate system of bamboo walkways forms a web around the houses on their stilts and the place is teeming with people who are shown constantly scrutinizing the Europeans.  Almayer is disengaged from the place, always wearing his planter’s white suit and tie and he never approaches the squalid, crowded village.  By contrast, Willems spends most of his time prowling the village and the shadowy water under the platforms of its houses.  Like the canoe boy, he paddles around sulking, and, always, alone in his own canoe.  Further, despite Francis’ claim about Reed’s humorlessness, there are several particularly funny scenes in the movie, most notably the parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado that we see in the opening when the clerk sent to summon Willems from the billiard hall goes out into the bright sunlight spinning his parasol jauntily as he hurries across the plaza.

     

When first released, Outcast of the Islands was acclaimed.  It was nominated as Best Picture in Great Britain’s BAFTA awards.  Bosley Crowther praised the move as being vividly realistic, engaging, but ultimately thematically vapid – it is nothing more than “a spectacle of dry rot,” he asserted.  Later, Pauline Kael said that the movie was “uneven” but that the movie’s great “gesture toward life” was the villainy shown by Trevor Howard’s character, Willems – the character was unreservedly evil but “vividly alive.”  

Outcast of the Islands is a psychological study in betrayal.  The film is not a critique of the colonialist enterprise – the characters in the film are cosmopolitan traders and all thieves to some extent.  Lingard has a monopoly on the river and Sambir’s commerce until Willems is persuaded to betray his secret passage into the interior to the fez-wearing Arab.  (The movie is overdetermined with respect to this plot point – Willems ostensibly acts on the basis of his obsession with Aissa; Conrad says that Willems will only be allowed to associate with Aissa if Omar approves this liaison and his approval is withheld until the Arabs are given access to the river.  But we see Willems carefully noting the seaway’s location on a chart of the archipelago as he is sailing to Sambir with Lingard, long before he ever cast eyes on Aissa.  Therefore, it seems pretty evident that Willems, whose modus operandi is treachery, is positioned to betray Lingard before being tempted by Aissa.)  Lingard’s monopoly isn’t based on any cognizable claim of virtue but results from the sea captain’s cunning – there’s no particular reason to prefer him to the Arab traders and the film shows him as vengeful and self-interested.  When his yoke is cast off, the villagers enthusiastically revolt against his trading operation – although the riot seems to be based on the innate viciousness of the villagers and not any particular claim of oppression; no doubt the Arabs will be equally extortionate and unfair in their dealings with these people who are, more or less, pirates themselves.  Virtuous characters are scarce in the movie – Aissa embodies Oriental savagery; her father is a vicious old sea wolf; Almayer seems to be a fool who mercilessly bullies the shiftless Willems; his wife’s distaste for Willem’s affair with Aissa seems based on her desire for the disreputable con man.  Even Nina, Almayer’s little girl, surely one of the homeliest of all child actors, is nasty and cruel.  This is a film without a hero and, more or less, without any overriding principles.  In this regard, Outcast of the Islands is an adult picture of the kind rarely made any longer, Viewers have to make up their minds about who is in the right or, in fact, if anyone can even make that claim.  

  

Reed v. Conrad

It’s instructive to compare the script of Outcast of the Islands (written by William Fairchild) to Conrad’s novel.  Certainly, there are racist elements in both versions of the story.  But it’s interesting to observe that, generally, the film shows more anxiety about race than the novel and is more offensive, I think, than the novel.

The first thing to observe is that in the book, Peter Willems has a wife named Joanna.  Joanna is half Malaysian; her father is Willems employer, the Dutch trader, Hudig.  (Willems relationship with Joanna is problematic; the book tells us that “she had rebelled (against the marriage) once – at the beginning.  But only once.”  Willems is explicitly described as a “wife-beater” who has thrashed Joanna into submission; no one seems to care much about this aspect of the caddish Willems’ conduct.)  Willems has a child with Joanna and this boy figures in the climax in Conrad’s novel.  Notice that Reed gives Willems an English wife – like Joanna, she despises Willems, but the character is a dead end and, once Willems leaves the harbor town, she vanishes from the picture.  This is very unlike Conrad’s management of the book’s climax in which Joanna almost literally “shoots it out” with Aissa.

As with the American fur trade, the business model for trading enterprises in Malaysia seems to have been that the European businessmen made marriages with the daughters of local princes and chieftains.  Conrad establishes this in the case of Almayer.  In the novel, Almayer is married to a Malaysian woman and, therefore, Nina is “half-caste.”   Reed won’t stand for this sort of miscegenation.  He casts Wendy Hillier, the archetypal English rose, as Almayer’s wife.  (And, further, Reed and his screenwriter put in a very effective and delicate subtext establishing the repressed desire felt by Almayer’s wife for the handsome, if brutal, Willem – this subtext strengthens the strong current of hatred that drives Almayer’s business relationship with Willem.  There is nothing like this in Conrad and, in this respect, I think the film scenario improves on the novel.)

It seems clear that in the early fifties, Reed felt that he couldn’t show a English male cohabiting with a native woman, a state of affairs that Conrad takes for granted. Reed’s difficulties also arise from changing “Kasper” Almayer, a Dutchman, to Elmer Almayer, played by the quintessentially British, Robert Morley.  Perhaps, Dutchmen might marry native women, but not an Englishman.  

Furthermore, the feminist implications of Conrad’s novel are considerably weakened by Reed’s decision to render Aissa as silent, a native woman who doesn’t understand English (or Dutch) and can’t communicate with her lover, Willem.  Indeed, at one point, Willem insults Aissa wondering aloud what she would think if she knew what he was saying.  This is distinctly different from Conrad’s conception of the character.  In the novel, Aissa is loquacious, seems to speak several languages, and acts politically, gambling that her liaison with Willem will enhance the standing of her people, a pirate tribe now living as supplicants to the local villagers at Sambir.  Conrad doesn’t hesitate to show us Aissa’s deliberations and we understand what she is thinking.  Reed portrays her like Kurtz’ African mistress as a sinister force of nature, an inarticulate embodiment of seductive lust and desire.  (She’s always giving someone or other the ‘the side eye’ – that is looking with disgust at those around her.)  In all respects, Aissa’s character has “agency” to use modern terms and is empowered by Conrad to act on her own behalf as well as on behalf of her blind father and her people.  Indeed, she shoots Willems to death at the climax of Conrad’s novel, an episode that is not shown, or, even, suggested in the movie.  

Lingard acts in a paternal role to both Joanna, Willems’ lawful wife, and Almayer’s wife, who was rescued as a child by the sea captain from pirates – we are given to understand that she is a Sulu woman, a survivor of a pirate raid repelled by Lingard in which the rest of the raiders were killed.  (In the movie, since Wendy Hillier plays Almayer’s wife, Lindgard is openly acknowledged to be the woman’s father and Nina, who is not mixed race in the film, is the sea captain’s granddaughter.)  Lingard exemplifies the specious paternalist aspects of colonialism –he is always acting for the supposed good of others, but with disastrous results.  (When he saves some Chinese from pirates, the rescued people, who are also pirates, attack his ship and kill a number of his sailors; when he rescues a dog, the animal turns out to be rabid and runs amok biting several people.)  Out of some kind of misguided charity, Lingard brings Willems’ spurned wife to Sambir along with her “ugly brat”, Lewis.  At the end of the book, Joanna travels upriver in a canoe to confront Willems who is living in a shack with Aissa.  Ever the doormat, Joanna pleads with Willems to take her back, apparently, willing to forgive his catastrophic dalliance with Aissa.  Aissa, a much stronger and more independent character, has contempt for Joanna, whom she derisively calls a “Sirani”, that is, “Nazarene” or Christian.  Conrad’s penultimate chapter in Outcast of the Islands is spectacular, or spectacularly “campy,” depending your outlook.  Willems wants to return to Joanna because he believes there is a possibility that she can get him back to Singapore, regarded as civilization in the novel’s terms.  But Aissa demands Willems’ allegiance.  (Willems has tried to hide her behind a tree!)  The two woman confront one another and it looks like a catfight is about to ensue. Then, Aissa solves the problem by taking Willems’ revolver and gunning him down.  This is undisguised kitsch but pretty effective.  For better or worse, Reed can’t touch this stuff – it’s radioactive in 1951, two women, one half-breed and the other native, fighting over a European man who has had sex with both of them.  

There are other deviations from the novel, of course, most notably in the scene early in the book (and movie) in which Willems considers suicide.  In the film, there’s no question that Willems feigns a suicide attempt to secure Captain Lingard’s sympathy.  Conrad shows us Willems actually considering drowning himself (we’re privy to his despairing thoughts) before Lingard intervenes.  In all respects, Conrad’s Willems is a weaker character, more prone to being influenced by sinister forces, for instance Aissa who is, herself, being manipulated by the cunning Babalatchi.  In Reed’s conception, Willems is a villainous cad, an unrepentant narcissist who acts in his interest to damage others.  

Conrad ends the book with a final chapter that serves as an epilogue.  “Many years later”, Almayer is entertaining a “Roumanian naturalist”, exploring the jungle for orchids.  (The Naturalist is a drunken swine.)  In their colloquy, we learn that Lingard has returned upriver to place a stone monument over Willems inscribed: “Peter Willems, Delivered by the Mercy of God from his Enemy.”  Aissa has gone mad, but, later, became a nursemaid and confidant to Nina.  Almayer casually remarks that she was the “doubled-up crone” who served them their meal a few hours earlier.  “They age quickly here,” he explains. Particularly, Almayer says, since Aissa often sleeps in the back country in a certain meadow by a stream – the reader understands that this is where she and Willems made love.   

The Pope's Exorcist

 The Catholic Church has a problem with evil -- it has ceased to believe that it exists.  Perhaps, it's a matter of semantics:  the panel of priests interrogating the titular "Pope's exorcist", a jovial, burly cleric named Father Amorth, played by no less than Russell Crowe, seem to believe in paranoid schizophrenia and misguidedness but not the sort of evil that Old Nick sponsors in the world.  The priests question Amorth about an exorcism conducted somewhere in Italy; since the filmmakers suspect that most of the viewers won't want to read subtitles, the chairman of the ecclesiastical panel demands that Amorth respond to them in English, no doubt a relief to Russell Crowe whose Italian (and Latin), however, sounds competent and melodious.  Amorth has assisted a crazed kid by using the oldest trick in the book -- he taunts the demon into inhabiting a beautiful black pig and, then, has his colleague blast the beast with a shotgun the moment the demon gets inside the porker; exactly why this would work is unclear to me. (I live in Austin, Minnesota within a mile of a big packing plant where thousands of pigs perish daily and I was appalled to see the waste of good pork implied in this scene.)  It's not obvious why the priests are belaboring poor Amorth, but he basically gives them the finger and stalks out of the tribunal.  He has demons to battle.

Meanwhile down in Castile, an attractive young widow and her two kids install themselves in an obviously haunted abbey -- somehow they have inherited this scary place from the widow's deceased husband,  impaled through the forehead somehow in a gory crash that took place a year earlier.  They are planning to renovate the place, probably to turn it into some giant and ghastly B & B, but the resident devils aren't cooperating.  When the workers break through a hollow wall, they find a hidden passageway marked with the papal insignia.  Unfortunately, a huge ball of hell-fire erupts through the wall and toasts several workers.  The contractor, deterred by this calamity, decamps from the haunted abbey to leave the plucky widow and her two kids to deal with the spooks.  A powerful demon gets inside the little boy, withers him to skin and bones and taunts mom and sister in a guttural basso profundo voice.  Doctors in the nearby city can't figure out what's wrong with the kid -- their diagnostic manuals don't  include a billing code for demonic possession -- and so they release the family to return to their haunted mansion.  Things go from bad to worse when a local priest, Esquibel, comes to visit the kid -- he's named Henry -- and gets his ass kicked by the demon who shrieks at the Mom:  "You brought the wrong priest!"  This is obviously a job for the Pope's exorcist, Father Amorth.

What follows is a spectacle of cheesy CGI effects that get progressively bigger and more implausible with each scene.  The battle royale between the demon and the two priests includes projectile vomiting (blood), head-spinning, gory letters inscribed on people's bellies and rib cages, and the  infamous "spider walk" in which a character's limbs dislocate so that theulook like the legs of a coffee table and, then, the critter crawls up and down walls, shrieking imprecations.  While the family is suffering, shall I say, the "pangs of the damned", the two priests abandon them to explore a huge subterranean space seemingly hidden in the walls of the abbey.  Sniffing the air, Amorth says that it smells of "gas, sulphur, and little death."  Mummified exorcists are installed in the crypt.  At the Vatican, the Pope himself, played by the redoubtable Franco Nero, researches the case and discovers that all the records relating to the abbey have been mysteriously redacted -- a curious sight to see an illuminated manuscript filled with apparently random scribbles.  However, somehow Amorth figures out that in 1475, an exorcist was possessed himself by the demon Asmodeus and infiltrated the Catholic Church inspiring the Spanish Inquisition.  (Are we to believe that a similar thing happened at Vatican II with Belial seizing control of the Holy Roman Church and instituting a regime of child molestation?)  There's some more battling with demons and the Pope himself gets remotely infected by evil, also engaging in a spouting session of projectile vomiting.  There's not only a vast underground playground in which the demons can torment the heroes but also a haunted well that seems to drop straight down to hell.  Asmodeus knows the weakness of the priests:  Amorth is haunted war-time memories (he was partisan in Italy fighting the Fascists in WWII) and the devil exploits those memories by having the possessed kid vomit out a red bird that somehow figures in his PTSD -- this bird multiplies into a whole flock of devil-birds.  Various comely women that both priests have known appear naked and slathered in blood to tempt the protagonists.  (I think they would be more effective as seductresses without the gore cosmetics.)  In the end, the devil's win and the Catholic Church becomes the Synagogue of Satan and the world goes to Hell in a handbasket.  (I'm just kidding.)   With Asmodeus vanquished, Esquibel and Amorth set forth to slay the other 199 fallen angels lurking on Earth -- they give each other a 'high five" and set out for their inevitable sequel.  A closing title tells us that Amorth continued to fight demons until he died in 2015 and wrote many books advertising that "they are good books."  The Pope is pleased by this turn of events having survived his bout with demonic possession and, in the interest of racial equity, he installs Father Lumumba, a cool African bishop to serve as Amorth's supervisor.  The guy who didn't believe in evil seems to have suffered a fit of apoplexy and dropped dead on the cold floor of an ancient church.  Franco Nero will be familiar to audiences who watch spaghetti Westerns -- here in his old age, he appears as a poor man's Christopher Lee who was, in fact, a poor man's Alex Guinness.  Toward the end of the colossal battle between Amorth and Asmodeus, I expected the little kid to bellow:  "You fat fuck, you were overrated in Gladiator and now look at the depths to which you have sunk to act in this horrible piece of shit!"  I apologize for the obscenity.  But that's just the way demons speak. 

(The real Gabriele Amorth was an exorcist affiliated with the Vatican.  He was a partisan fighter, lawyer, and author with 30 books to his credit.  Born in 1925, he died in 2016.  In 2000, he claimed to have performed 50,000 exorcisms; by 2013, the number was asserted to be 130,000.  This begs the question as to when he had time to write his thirty books.  His bolstered the number of exorcisms, some commentators say, by claiming that certain poor devils had multiple demons in them and that he might expel a dozen evil spirits in one session.  He believed that demonic possession was common in the modern world due to Ouija boards, Yoga, and Freemasonry.  If you read the "talk" section on Amorth's wikipedia entry you will see that those who doubt the probity of the Good Father are claimed to be possessed by the Devil or, at least, doing the Devil's work themselves.)

Since writing this review, clumps of my hair have fallen out, blood blisters on my belly are calling me names, and my voice has dropped a full two octaves.

Il Buco (Film Study Group essay)

Michelangelo Frammartino, the director of Il Buco (“The Hole”), was born in Milan in Northern Italy.  But his parents were Calabrian immigrants from Italy’s extreme south.  He was born in 1967, six years after the events shown in Il Buco.  The film connects Italy’s north and south.  The openinq sequence shows Calabrian people watching a grainy TV image of the construction of a skyscraper in Milan.  

Frammartino studied architecture but migrated into art.  His first works were installations in galleries and museums in northern Italy.  He worked for a few years making TV videos and commercials and, between 1995 and 2000, he made five short films – most of them accessories to his museum installations.  His first feature-length movie was made released in 2004 Il Dono (“The Gift”), apparently a picture about an elderly farmer who befriends a woman thought by her family to be possessed by demon.  It was six years later that Frammartino’s next movie, Le quattro Volte (“The Four Turns”) was released.  Le quattro Volte is obliquely based on Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmutation of souls through matter.  The film involves a man who dies and, then, seems to reborn as a goat.  The goat goes astray and perishes under a large tree.  The tree is cut down for a village festival involving men climbing its trunk to reach for prizes.  The tree is, then, cut into logs and transported to a kiln where it is burned into charcoal.  The charcoal is driven by lorry to the town where the old man died and used to heat the homes there – the process is man to goat to tree to mineral (carbonized charcoal) and, in the final image, to smoke or vapor.  While scouting locations for Le quattro Volte, Frammartino came upon the Bifurto Abyss in the Pollino Mountains near Cerchiara di Calabria, a village in southern Calabria.  Most of Le quattro Volte was shot on Pollino Mountain and, although Frammartino thought he knew the mountain very well, he was surprised to learn that it contains an unexpected hidden interior landscape, the shaft of the cave.  

It took Frammatino ten years to make Il Buco and the film’s production at the remote and mostly inaccessible Bifurto Abyss was extremely arduous.  Il Buco has won many international awards including a Special Jury Award at Cannes. The movie exemplifies the Italian esthetic of “slow cinema”, a style of filmmaking that defines itself in opposition to American popular films.  

Production Notes

The Bifurto abyss is 700 meters deep and was once thought to be the deepest cavern in Europe. (It is now counted as the third deepest cave in Europe.) The director of photography, Renato Berta, a Swiss cameraman was in his early seventies when the movie was shot and did not descend into the cavern.  Rather, a fiber-optic cable was lowered into the abyss and he directed the camerawork remotely from the surface.  The cave posed serious obstacles to filming.  It takes five hours to lower a camera crew to the small lake near the bottom of the cavern and, often, the crew worked underground for twenty hours a day.  Sometimes, five minutes of film might require fifteen hours of work.  Frammartino entered the cave frequently with a team of seven experienced spelunkers, although he admits to having been initially terrified by the place.  On one occasion, a thunderstorm dropped several inches of rain onto the mountain meadow above the cave and the abyss flooded.  Frammartino and his crew were trapped for a few hours in a side fissure behind a forty-foot waterfall of water plunging into the cavern.  The event was covered on Italy’s cable news channels as a frightening and dangerous catastrophe.  Frammartino says that he never felt at risk and, in fact, regarded this experience as pleasant and soothing, a sort of respite from the intense filming schedule.  (Insuring the production was another challenge; several insurance companies declined to underwrite coverage for the dangerous production.)

Filming involved operating electrical equipment in the 100% humidity prevailing in the cave.  The movie is shot on a Sony Venice digital device.  Analog equipment would not function in the difficult conditions in the Abyss.  Camera equipment was lowered into the cave and remained underground during the six week shoot.  Frammartino’s team of professional speologists moved the equipment after each day’s work to the place where the next shots would be made.  Berta directed the camera from the surface via a monitor connected by fiber-optic cable.  Frammartino remarks on the disconnect between what the people in the cave thought that the images looked like and how they appeared to Berta.  Often Frammartino, who was underground, would think that an entire day’s work was wasted, only to learn from Berta upon emerging from the cavern that the footage was spectacular.  Conversely, pictures that the crew in the cave thought were effective, often, turned out to be unusable.  At the end of each day’s work, memory cards containing the digital images were hauled up to the surface by an elaborate system of winches and hoists.  No additional lighting was used to illumine the cave.  The pictures made underground rely exclusively on the light emitted by the carbide lamps worn by the spelunkers.

Frammartino made about 30 to 35 descents into the cave.  Sound was recorded on a Dolby Atmos system.  Recording in the cave was also extremely complex due to so-called “sound mirages” – that is, sound seeming to emanate in a paradoxical way from an area opposite where the sound was produced (a sort of echo effect).  Experienced cavers report that often spelunkers have the distinct impression that there is someone with them, nearby, although this is a sort of hallucination.  Frammartino experienced this on several occasions.  Once he ascended out of the cave, making a three hour climb while continuously hearing a crew-member directly behind him.  Dozens of times, he shouted “free, free, free” to signify that he had completed a pitch and that the climber behind him could, then, ascend the rope.  Upon reaching the surface, Frammartino discovered to his amazement that he was alone – there was no one climbing behind him.  

The first descent to the bottom of the Bifurto Abyss occurred in 1961 and was accomplished by a group of Piedmontese speologists, a spelunking “grotto’ as caving clubs are called, from Milan.  Although the descent was a remarkable accomplishment, the cavers decided to not publicize their efforts.  Researching this first exploration, Frammartino found a file containing a two page account of the descent, a number of old photographs, and a map of the cave – there was no publicity of any kind and the cavers didn’t discuss their efforts with anyone.  (At the time of the first descent, the Abyss was the deepest cave then-discovered in Europe.)

Frammartino uses 1961 circa caving technology in the film.  Modern cavers use LED lighting on their hard hats; Frammartino’s speleologists employ carbide lamps.  Although the gear used to probe the cave’s depths is antique – the sort of carabiners, ropes, inflatable raft, and fiber ladders that existed at time of the initial descent.  Frammartino has described the movie as a “period picture” in which he recreates both the technology of spelunking in 1961, but, also, the small town culture in Calabria in that period as well.

Frammartino: “Making a period piece is something in previous years that I didn’t think I would be able to do because I am interested in making cinema with a significant component of non-control.  A period piece clearly requires you to have the right outfit and handle everything in a certain way to bring the film and audience to that diegetic time.  Having to keep everything under control is something that scared me when I, on the contrary, wanted to set control aside.”  

Installation esthetics

Frammartino’s initial art works were museum installations, for instance, a high-resolution image of a Calabrian town, projected on the ceiling of a museum’s gallery.  He remains committed to this form of art and regards Il Buco as akin to his museum installations.  Frammartino chose a cave that is not known for speleothems – that is stalactites, stalagmites, and the like.  He calls the Bifurto Abyss a “naked cave.  “The Bifurto is a naked cave, so we could say it is not beautiful – even though, to me, it’s extremely beautiful for that reason.”  

Comparing Il Buco to his museum installations, Frammartino notes: “The collective experience of being in a dark room in front of a screen where truly feel the work other people are doing to when watching a film – and you share it and you perceive other people working along side you, the way your team members would during an exploration mission – is an experience that I consider fundamental.  I don’t want that to be lost.  This is the reason that I thought I would make a movie that would be a celebration of the theater experience and this way of enjoying cinema.  I was well aware that the film would lose a lot on our devices, but for me, it was an act of love for movie theater enjoyment.” (Frammartino’s emphasis on “work” – the movie’s audience is “working”to contribute to the experience – is interesting in light of the comments made by window-washer in the TV footage at the beginning of the movie.  As he washes windows, the man says, he observes other people working in the skyscraper and becomes so absorbed in their work that he forgets that he is also working.  Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philsopher said: “Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.”  In other words, those who behold the images on a screen in a dreamlike state are “working” and “helping to make something of the world.”)

The film’s spectacle contrasts with the grainy black-and-white images on the village TV set that we see at the start of the film.  The TV shows the Italian north and the Pirelli Tower, a skyscraper under construction.  In 1961, the Piedmont area of Italy, the north was undergoing an economic boom that attracted many immigrants from the much poorer and rural south, particularly Calabria.  (Ermanno Olmi’s great Il Fidanzati, “The Betrothed”, shows the effects of immigration in 1963 – although in this picture, a Milanese couple are separated when the man moves south to take a job in Sicily.)

In effect, Frammartino’s ambition is to turn the movie theater into an installation that simulates the experience of working in the darkness almost a kilometer under the earth.  Frammartino’s work, I think, bears some resemblance to the more daunting aspects of several films by Apichapatong Weerasethakul, the Thai director who also produces museum installation pieces. (Another analog is Chantal Akerman’s installation pieces, most notably the remarkable D’Est – From the East that premiered at the Walker Art Center in 1993; the installation in three rooms showed long, uninterrupted tracking shots made in Ukraine and Russia.  I didn’t understand the piece when I saw it, but have never forgotten the film’s imagery.)

In an interview, Frammartino said: “I think of cinema like a site-specific installation.  There’s the placement of the screen, there’s the placement of the audience, and there’s the darkness that comes forth.”     

Representation

Frammartino distinguishes between “presence” and “representation”.  

“It was also very important to me that the image of this film was closer to ‘presence’ than ‘representation.’ I didn’t want the group (of spelunkers) to ‘represent’ the 1961 group that made the mission, even though I dressed them the same way.  I wanted this group to behave the way cave explorers do when faced by a cave.  The difference – between an image that represents and an image that presents – is very important to me.  What we did was actually go on our own mission, ourselves to shoot this film.  I wasn’t about telling another story.  It was our story.”  

Geography

Il Buco is shot in Pollino National Park, a sprawling district in southern Italy encircling the Pollino Range, part of the southern Appenines with peaks rising as high as 7400 feet.  (Mount Pollino is on the border between the provinces of Basilicata and Calabria.)  This is a wild area dotted with ancient villages, some of them inhabited by people who speak only Albanian.  (The dialects spoken in this region are alien to northern Italians; for instance, a Roman would not be able to understand the dialect spoken in Il Buco).  Le quattro Volte was shot in the highlands around Alessandria del Carreto, also in the Pollino district – the mayor of that town first showed Frammartino the Bifurto Abyss. The village featured in Il Buco is Cerchiara de Calabri, an very ancient town founded by the Greeks around 500 BC.  The town currently has 2447 inhabitants.  It is best known for S. Maria delli Armi, a church built against a cliff mined into cells that once housed 10th century Byzantine monks.  There is a well-established pilgrim hostel in the Church and the company of spelunkers spends the night there before traveling to the site of the abyss high in the mountains.  

What Il Buco is not

Il Buco is not an adventure film.  Although cave exploration is very hazardous, none of the dangers intrinsic to this endeavor are dramatized: no one slips or falls or suffers any injury; there are no close calls in the movie.  This is a bit peculiar because, during filming, there were mishaps including an instance in which the crew with Frammartino were trapped in the cave by flooding. But nothing like this is shown. Furthermore, Il Buco is not a study of character, that is grace under pressure, or courage or, even, endurance although cave exploration involves these qualities.  There are no feats of strength or particular displays of skill – everyone seems quietly and unobtrusively competent.  The cavers are anonymous; we rarely see them in a shot close enough to distinguish their features and the men and women comprising the team are not differentiated from one another.  (The human figures are dwarfed by nature; they are like the little creatures wearing pot-shaped hats that you see in the corner of landscape engravings by Brueghel – that is, generic figures who mostly exist to establish scale.)  There is no dialogue between the cavers.  Notably, they communicate like the old cowherd – that is, they use a non-verbal system of whistles and yelps to signal to one another.  (The old man calls his cattle using barks and yips; this is an old Calabrian way of herding livestock and, of course, returns in the last utterances heard in the movie.  Watch Il Buco with a domestic animal, for instance, a dog at your side, and you will be surprised to see how the animal responds to the old man’s calls.)  There are no romantic or comical interactions between the spelunkers.  No one seems competitive and there is no conflict in the film.  

What do the generic human explorers do in this film?  They go into a place, they walk around in it carefully observing their surroundings, and, then, make a map. There seems no urgency to the cave exploration.  Most of the time, the spelunkers are simply looking around.  The notion of entering a place, calmly looking at it, and returning with a map suggests some kind of philosophical enterprise.  We should carefully note what is there to be seen and prepare some kind of report about what we have encountered.  

Philosophical Argument

Il Buco embodies a philosophical argument (or propositions) about the world.  Philosophy interrogates the way that we organize or conceptualize reality.  To think is to impose a structure on the propositions (arrangements of facts) that make up the world.  For instance, the mind often constructs the world as a series of oppositions – that is, the high and the low, light and dark, culture and nature, the tower and the cave.  (There are Freudian psycho-sexual implications to this latter dialectic, but the film is uninterested in them – the lead speleologist in the film is a young woman but this is far more evident from still photographs taken of the production than the movie itself in which the cavers are generally filmed in long shots; I think it is this woman who creeps into the final pouch-like chamber of the abyss and, then, with her hands makes a gesturing signaling that this is all there is.  But, unless, you know her gender from publicity information, Frammartino makes nothing of this fact.)  Frammartino’s movie seems concerned with the empirical world as it is organized conceptually into these oppositions.  To cite Heraclitus again: the work of the mind is “distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is.”  

A fundamental aspect of this philosophical enterprise is understand where things are located and how the world is put together.  In Il Buco, Pollino Mountain rises above the sea.  From the cowherd’s vantage, when the weather is clear, we can look down upon the Ionian Sea, to the east of the Calabrian coast.  The cowherd’s vantage, a “belvedere” as it is called in TV footage of the tower, reaches from mountain to sea and, in fact, encompasses the little lighthouse that we see flashing above the train station when the Milanese spelunkers arrive in this landscape in the deep South of Italy.  The movie contains one of the most spectacular of all shot/reverse-shot edits: the lighthouse is shown above the train station as the cave explorers emerge onto the platform.  Then, there is a reverse shot from miles away in which we see the slopes of the mountains and the tiny revolving dot of light that is the lighthouse.  Between the sea and the mountain meadow in which the abyss is located, there is a village located in a dramatic cleft in the mountain range.  The cleft canyon and village seems to be midway between the ocean and the peaks.  It is at this half-way point that the cave explorers spend the night.  We see the cleft in the mountains both from below as a dramatic fissure in the ridge and from above as a pale canyon cutting through the massif. The way up to the village involves driving along a dry stream bed; the landscape is inscribed with the marks of flowing water just as the cave seems hollowed out by streams funneling into it.  In the meadow, there are several ponds that arc around the abyss like parenthesis marks.  The military vehicle climbing into the hills drives by women washing clothes who are at the base of the funnel from which water pours down out of the mountains although in this season the river is mostly dry.  Frammartino carefully establishes the milieu and the relations that exist between the parts of the landscape.  

(An exception to the precise, map-like delineation of space is the cowherd’s cabin, shown in repeated shots as occupying a hillside with the rear of the building apparently next to a rocky cliff.  But when the cabin is shown in reverse shot, it seems to be isolated, standing apart in a level meadow.  Where is the cliff?  For some reason, the shot/reverse shot geometry involving the cabin is rendered uncanny – in one shot, the cabin is pressed against the stone cliff (perhaps by the use of a telephoto lens); in the reverse shot, there is no sign of the cliff at all and the cabin is isolated on the meadow.  I don’t have an explanation for why Frammartino implements this effect – however, it may be because the cabin is where the old man lies, as if in state, comatose and, therefore, uncanny.  Perhaps, Frammartino desires to create a slight impression that the cowherd’s cabin isn’t really a part of this world, that it is somehow oddly distinct and possibly supernatural.)

One aspect of human understanding is our faculty for making comparisons.  The film presents a system of similes that clarifies our grasp of the world as presented to us.  Similes (or metaphors) are instructive comparisons that are an aid to thought – as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said in another context: Similes are “good to think with.”

The word “buco” or abyss summons to mind a “mouth” – that is, the buccal cavity.  The cave is a mouth opening into the earth that absorbs the explorers, flaming bits of magazine paper, and their soccer ball.  The correlation between “mouth” and cave is made explicit in a shot that shows the doctor in the village shining a light into a child’s mouth or ear – the orifices are illuminated by the doctor’s light like the cave is lit by carbide lamps of the spelunkers.  The town, after dark, is a maze of ancient stone walls, overhanging roofs, and tiny vertical alleys.  When we see the children with the spelunker’s helmets making their way through the village, we observe that this place is akin to the cave.  The human body is similarly a kind of cave – it has a mouth and consists of a long and winding tube.  We speak of someone exploring the bowels of the earth in a cave.  The abyss with its organic glistening forms, its wet recesses and puddle-lagoons and mud, equates to the inside of a human body.  The explorers are penetrating into the living body of the earth.  Similarly, the cowherd’s cottage is also filmed as a kind of tunnel, a chamber next to a corridor that leads to the bright meadows outside the dwelling.  As the flaming paper ripped from Epoch illumines the lower chambers in the cave with flickering orange radiance so does the brazier with open flame around which the shepherds are gathered in the cabin provide fitful illumination for the shack.  When the cowherd’s body is removed, a door is shut closing off the cabin and making it dark inside.  (We notice one of the other shepherds kissing the dead man just as the door is gently closed –a closing door signifies the end of things, just as the small chamber at - 683 meters represents the bottom of the cave.  When the door is closed by John Wayne in Ford’s The Searchers, we know the movie is at an end.)

Is Italy also a kind of cave with a brightly lit north and a dark bottom in the south?  Viewers will recognize the general form of the Italian peninsula in the shape of the cave drawn on the map that one of the spelunkers has made.  (The speleologist inking the final chamber at the bottom of the map labeled “Bifurto” signifies the end of the exploration.)  Italy ends with the heel and toe of its boot, a vertically configured shaft into the Mediterranean Sea.   Similarly, the cave ends on the map at the bottom of its vertical shaft into the mountain.  

Caves are openings into the Underworld, that is, the kingdom of the dead.  In the Bifurto Abyss, there is even a watery fragment of the River Styx.  The spelunkers have to cross a small pool of water in an inflatable raft to reach the deeper chambers in the cave.  The old cowherd dies in the course of Il Buco.  Figuratively, he enters into the realm of the Underworld signified by the cave.  Sleep is the brother of Death.  One of the few closeups of the spelunkers with camera placed sufficiently near to render their features shows two of the explorers sleeping.  Their peaceful sleep mirrors the inert and motionless old man who seems to be in some kind of a coma.  The old man in funereal repose upon his pallet-like bed reminds us of the body of the Saint, enclosed in a glass case in the sacristy of the old church in the village.  Thus, there is a pictorial equation between the comatose old man, the sleeping spelunkers, and the inert wooden figures in the sacristy, including most notably, the half-naked saint in his glass casket.  A shot shows several of the spelunkers reclining in the chapel’s sacristy with supine wooden effigies next to them.  

There are, at least, two abysses in the film: the cave and the dying old man.  The camera searches the dying man’s features for some glimmer of life.  We wonder what is concealed within the motionless figure.  Is he sentient in some respect?  What depths is he probing?  The comatose old man conceals depths that are inaccessible – no one can reach into the geology of his body (his face is a weathered landscape) to sound his depths.  

Il Buco is structured like poetry.  It is built on a series of correspondences.  The film’s method is associative.  Ordinarily, feature-length films are constructed around a plot or narrative; in the narrative, there is conflict that reveals character.  But there is no conflict in Il Buco and the figures in the film are like the wooden effigies in the chapel – they are stylized figures who represent cave explorers (without names or backstories), villagers, peasant shepherds, and military men.  In the absence of individuated characters and plot, the film’s meanings are produced by a series of associations or similes, that is, resemblances.  This is an unusual way to structure a feature-length movie (Il Buco is 93 minutes long) and accounts for the picture’s philosophical and poetic features.    

Transcendence versus Immanence

Everyone knows what transcendence means. When we rise above challenges or material obstacles, we are said to transcend them.  Transcendence is not merely a matter of altitude or spatial elevation; overcoming obstacles or material things also results in qualitative changes.  Matter may be somehow spiritualized and converted into some kind of ideal essence.  

Immanence is a much more difficult concept to understand and articulate.  It is seductive to imagine that immanence involves going beneath obstacles and material things – but this isn’t actual immanence, but rather some inverted form of transcendence.  Instead of rising above things, we somehow penetrate into a space below them.  On one level, the descent into the cave seems an enterprise involving immanence.  But the idea of immanence involves, also, a qualitative difference between the things that exist in our world and what lies beneath them.  Objects are rooted.  They appear out of darkness trailing, not clouds of transcendent glory, but shadows.  The project of immanence involves working one’s way through the darkness of the underground to encounter the origins of things, how it comes to be that the things we see in the sunlight exist with their foundations in bowels of the earth.  

The Pirelli Tower, 127 meters tall, is a form of the Tower of Babel.  Constructed between 1956 and 1958, the skyscraper is a symbol of transcendence.  When it was completed, the tower was said to symbolize Italy’s re-emergence as a major economic power from the rubble of World War Two.  The tower proclaims that Italy has transcended its Fascist past and become a modern democracy with a vibrant, productive economy.  The Bifurto Abyss is in a part of Italy that has always been profoundly impoverished and, even, backward.  The Abyss embodies immanence – that is, the ancient roots of rock and water on which the world is built.  

Top and Bottom

What’s at the top of the Pirelli Tower?  The film shows window-washing scaffolding inexorably climbing the glass walls of the skyscraper.  Some music adorns the scaffolding final ascent.  We expect the ride on this exterior elevator to end at some elevated outlook from which we will be able to see a majestic view of Milan and environs.  In fact, this upper terminus with a splendid prospect over Milan is suggested by the transit past the Belvedere, an enclosed space affording a vantage point over the city.  But the elevator-scaffolding glides past that uppermost floor and its upward motion ends beneath an unprepossessing metal grate that could just as well be in a sewer, a sort of catwalk where a man is glaring at the camera.  The film’s world exists between an elevation of 127 meters above grade and 683 meters below ground.  The upper limit seems to be capped by a steel catwalk; it’s unimpressive just as, I suppose, the top of Mount Everest is merely a small knoll of trampled snow dipped into the jet stream. 

The cave’s bottom is likewise unprepossessing.  It’s a wet cavity at the bottom of a stone sluice with nothing much to see. 

Kafka

Die Schacht von Babel  

Was baust do?  Ich will einen Gang graben.  Es muss ein Fortschritt geschehen. Zu hoch oben is mein Standort.  Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.

The Pit of Babel

What are you building?  I want to dig a shaft.  Progress must be made.  My standing is too high up.  We’re digging the pit of Babel.

(From Kafka’s unpublished and uncollected writings 1922 - 1924.)

The Big Horns

Once, thirty years ago, I was hiking alone on a windswept ridge at 11,000 feet in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.  There were no trees on the exposed rock on the mountain, except for a few wind-sculpted pines huddled together in little crevasses trenched into the top of the domed flanks of the ridge.  I came to a fissure that intrigued me; the rock was crumbling, cracked by the elements into a sort of cup-shaped funnel.  At the bottom of the funnel, there was a crooked slot that was dark with shadow.  I slid down the tilted sides of the funnel to the lip of the black, elliptical opening.  When I kicked a stone into the pit, the rock fell and fell and fell and never hit bottom.  Then, I sensed that the mountain was somehow exhaling through the hole and I could feel a gust of air, warmer than the cool wind blowing along this summit.  The air smelled wet and foul.  Suddenly, I felt very afraid and scrambled away from the edge of the pit, my feet dislodging gravel from the crumbling sides of the trench, debris that also was sucked into the hole and fell without any sound of the stones striking bottom.  

Later, I learned that a Grotto (caving club) at the University of Wyoming had explored many of the caves on the ridge that I had been hiking.  Some of the shafts were three-hundred feet deep.