Silk Stockings

Ninotchka (1939) is an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a stern Communist idealogue who happens to be a woman softening and finding love in Paris; the movie, starring Greta Garbo (with Bela Lugosi as one of the Commissars) was a big hit and re-made 18 years, and one World War, later as a musical Silk Stockings.  The 1957 film was the last picture directed Ruben Mamoulian; Cyd Charisse plays the fierce female apparatchik courted in Fred Astaire.  Peter Lorre is one of the three Russian agents seduced by the City of Lights -- Lorre was old when the movie was made and he can't really dance and, so, he performs in the musical numbers by suspending himself between a chair and table and doggedly kicking at the air -- it's unutterably weird and endearing.  The movie was based on a Broadway revival of the film with songs by Cole Porter that are, more or less, clever, melodic, and forgettable -- the exception is a bizarre rock and roll number that Astaire performs near the end of the movie.  The picture is highly regarded, indeed, said to be one of the great movie musicals, but I wasn't attuned to its wave-length:  the dance numbers are suave but not explosive or particularly kinetic, the music is okay, the acting is excellent but the script is a bit schematic -- the story is simple to the point of being boring:  the stern lady commissar melts in the arms of Fred Astaire, here playing the producer of a movie musical himself, and apparels herself in silk lingerie, sipping champagne with her lover.  She comes to conclude that the beautiful is just as important as the useful -- a revelation that changes her life.  After the lovers are separated, she renounces her love and returns to her ideological purity until the plot contrives a basis for her to return to Paris.  Of course, Astaire is waiting for her debonair as ever, singing and dancing in a night club that Peter Lorre and his comrades have established for Russian emigres.  Love prevails and all ends on a merry note.  The technicolor photography is nondescript and the editing mostly invisible -- the film is sleek, well-appointed and craftsmanlike.  Paradoxically, Cyd Charisse is more sexy and has a greater erotic charge as the relentless Marxist fundamentalist -- a more serious movie would hint at some kind of tragic backstory involving famine and war (and we learn she was the commander of a woman's tank brigade).  Once she dissolves into an ingenue in love, the character is less interesting.  Fred Astaire is palpably too old for the role, something that he admitted himself to Mamoulian when he protested being cast in the picture.  The dance scenes are shot in continuous long takes to preserve the illusion that we are watching a Broadway musical from the other side of the proscenium.  The film's style is classical with very few close-ups.  There is a witty song about the three dwarves (this is the group of Russian agents including Lorre) being sent to Siberia.  When Ninotchka arrives in Paris her first priority is to see the sights -- which for her includes the Sewage Treatment Plant; with Astaire as her guide she visits both cafes and foundries.  Paris is represented by the Arc d' Triumph and a couple of sidewalk cafes; most of the action takes place in lavishly appointed hotel rooms.  A lot of the dialogue is cunning and funny.  The composer whom Ninotchka has been dispatched to retrieve -- he's modeled on Stravinsky it seems -- has written an Ode to a Tractor and, when Fred Astaire tempts him with a big salary to write the score for his movie musical, the man worries about taxes.  "You'll make $50,000," Astaire assures him.  Someone asks:  "What will the taxes be?"  "$50,000," the man says. (I think Mamoulian appears in the film as the director of the movie within the movie.) 

Femme Fatale (Film note)

 Femme Fatale

1.

Life is but a dream.

Hollywood has been called the dream factory.   Movies exist at the intersection of private dreams and public, shared fantasies.

In Calderon’s 1636 Spanish baroque play, La Vida es Sueno (“Life is a Dream”), a King, Basilio, is told by an oracle that his infant son, Segismundo, will grow up to kill him and seize the throne.  Basilio imprisons Segismundo, chaining him in a tower.  From time to time, Segismundo’s warden administers powerful sedatives to him, causing the young man to sleep.  He is told that his present state of misery is merely a dream.  He can’t oppose the evils that have befallen him because they are not real, merely the content of his nightmare.  Later, Segismundo is freed from his confinement.  All sorts of mayhem ensues including war, rape, and murder.  At the height of the violence, Segismundo is told that nothing that has happened to him after his escape from the tower is real – it is all just a vivid dream from which he will awake one day to find himself still fettered in the tower.  At the end of the play, there is a battle in which Segismundo captures his father, and, after threatening to kill the King, spares his life.  The playwright, Calderon, tells us that God is constant and rules both waking life and dreams.  Therefore, one should strive to do good whether in our dreams or our actual life – in fact, we are incapable of distinguishing dream from reality; there is no reliable way of determining whether we are awake or dreaming.

The themes explored in Calderon’s Baroque play are: predestination, the labyrinth, the monster in the labyrinth, and our inability to know whether we are awake or dreaming: Are these my authentic memories or have I merely dreamed that these things occurred?

2.

Brian De Palma is the most baroque of the filmmakers who came of age in the nineteen-seventies.  He is part of the generation of directors that include Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola.  Of these filmmakers, De Palma alone has continued to explore the post-modern themes that originally inspired him – late films like Femme Fatale (2002) and Passion (2012) recycle questions of appearance and reality, preordained doom, betrayal and nightmare that animated the director’s early movies, all in the context of a delirious, hallucinatory style derived from the most overheated sequences in Hitchcock’s films. (De Palma’s late style is heavily intertextual, although the allusions in his most recent films are most commonly references to earlier movies made by the director himself – Femme Fatale invokes Body Double, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out. The erotic thriller, a film genre, in which reality is dissolved by corrosive, overwhelming lust, has been De Palma’s metier in his best and most personal films from the separated-at-birth Siamese twin siblings in 1972's slasher thriller Sisters through Carrie (1974) with the voyeuristic camera prowling through a steamy locker room full of naked teenage girls and pictures like the cult-classic Body Double (1984 - full of actual porn stars) and Raising Cain (1992) in which John Lithgow plays a cross-dressing sex murderer.  

At the outset, Brian De Palma aspired, by his own admission, to be “the American Godard,” that is the auteur of films that endorsed their own artificiality, that acknowledged their genre conventions, and that were intertextual, comprised of networks of allusions and citations.  Yet, at the same time, De Palma’s master is Alfred Hitchcock.  It is impossible to reconcile the notion of making movies both like Godard and Hitchcock – this unstable compound: Godcock or Hitchard, is an impossible contradiction, an obscure object of desire, the epitome of cognitive dissonance.  De Palma’s schizophrenic moviemaking has led to equally schizophrenic and polarized responses among his critics.  

A brief review of Wikipedia entries as to De Palma’s more scandalous films reveal that critical opinion about these movies is deeply divided.  Generally, only about a third of the critics reviewing his pictures recommend them.  The “Rotten Tomatoes” ratings for his films hover around 25 to 40% favorable.  And, yet, each of these controversial films has its champions.  The most common adjectives applied to his pictures in unfavorable reviews are that they are “nonsensical,” “silly”, and garishly imitative of Hitchcock’s better, more restrained and stylish thrillers.  But several major critics have praised his pictures – most notably, De Palma was heavily promoted by the formidable Pauline Kael during the first half of his career; thereafter, his films were the subject of admiring reviews by Roger Ebert.  Indeed, De Palma’s continued viability as a filmmaker derives in large part from the support of Kael and, later, Ebert – both highly influential critics.  I know of no other American filmmaker who has inspired such a radical split in the critical establishment – writers like Kael and Ebert have enthusiastically praised pictures like Body Double, Femme Fatale, and The Fury, that were also widely denounced as raw, misogynist exploitation by more conservative and mainstream critics.  Femme Fatale like Dressed to Kill were films savagely derided by most reviewers, but, now, considered cult-classics.

De Palma began his career making anarchic comedies in a free style influenced by Godard and Richard Lester’s Beatles films – examples are Hi, Mom! (1969) and Get to know your Rabbit (1972).  His first thriller expressing De Palma’s characteristic themes – sex murder and doppelgaengers, insanity and naked lust – was Sisters (1972) with Margot Kidder playing a dual Jekyll and Hyde role.  This movie was followed by a musical of sorts The Phantom of the Paradise, a remake of The Phantom of the Opera set in the rock-and-roll world of the Fillmore West and, perversely, starring the diminutive pop star Paul Williams.  (The Phantom of the Paradise is very hard to see due to some kind of litigation in which the rights to the picture are entangled – but it’s great, De Palma first full-blown baroque masterpiece.)  De Palma made a trio of movies heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho – these are Obsession (1976), Carrie (1977), a big box-office hit with Sissy Spacek half drowned in swine blood, and The Fury (1978), an over-the-top movie about telekinesis that was much derided in its time, but now seems prescient of many of the X-Men (and other) superhero pictures – The Fury starred Kirk Douglas and John Cassavetes establishing De Palma’s ability to attract important Hollywood stars to his films.  (Pauline Kael’s fan reviews of these pictures also helped to establish his bona fides in the Industry.)  In 1980, De Palma made Dressed to Kill, another sex murderer film starring Michael Caine and Angie Dickinson.  This was followed by De Palma’s most highly regarded psychological thriller, Blow Out, a remake, in some ways of Antonioni’s seminal Blow Up; this 1981 movie stars John Travolta and was a great success with audiences. 

By the early eighties, De Palma was sufficiently bankable for the big studios to hire him as director on expensive prestige projects.  (These projects ultimately proved to be De Palma’s downfall because he was not, by disposition, well-suited to the conservative requirements of pictures of this sort.)  Scarface (1983) with Al Pacino is an example of a big-budget crime film, intended to compete with epic pictures like Coppola’s Godfather trilogy.  After Scarface, De Palma cleansed his palate, as it were, with the deeply personal, obsessive, and delirious Body Double (1984), probably De Palma’s most divisive movie – many feminist-inclined critics denounced the picture as sadistically misogynist.  Notwithstanding those criticisms, De Palma was retained to direct The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and a script by playwright David Mamet.  This 1987 film was a box office success that led to De Palma’s being given free rein to produce the nightmarish Viet Nam picture Casualites of War (1989 with Michael J. Fox and Sean Penn).  Casualties of War, involving the rape and murder of a Vietnamese civilian, was too grim to succeed with the public.  Nonetheless, De Palma was greenlit to make his screen adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities, based on the Tom Wolfe bestselling novel.  This film was an unmitigated catastrophe on all levels, the sort of failure that might end a director’s career.  But De Palma returned to his psycho-sexual slasher film roots with Raising Cain (1992), a movie sufficiently successful to return the director to prestige projects, first Carlito’s Way (1993) with Al Pacino, and, then, the inaugural film in the Mission Impossible franchise, a big budget spectacle with Tom Cruise released in 1994.  Mission Impossible represented the apogee of De Palma’s success with large-scale star-driven projects.  His next films were made on limited budgets and were all failures at the box office, these include Snake Eyes (1996 with Nicholas Cage), Femme Fatale, Redacted, another hellish war film about a massacre of civilians in Iraq (2007), Passion (2012) yet another erotic thriller, and, finally Domino (2017), a failed film shot in Denmark that went straight to video.  De Palma is presently 85 and it seems unlikely that he will be able to make another film.

A glance at De Palma’s career reveals the director’s versatility and competence in different modes of movie-making.  De Palma has proven capable of making audience-satisfying big budget pictures like Scarface and Mission Impossible.  He has made a number of smaller budget psychological thrillers with intense erotic sequences – these pictures like Femme Fatale are surrealistically excessive variants on film noir and his most personal and impressive pictures.  But he has also made comedies, a musical (The Phantom of Paradise) and indignant, cruel war films.   

3.

Femme Fatale was released in 2002.  It is unabashedly an “erotic thriller.”  But, by the time of its release, public enthusiasm for the genre had lapsed.  After the year 2000, the market for erotic thrillers was saturated and movies of that type were no longer popular.  The film’s belated appearance as an example of a genre that had waned may explain why it was generally disregarded or derided when first released.  (De Palma followed the film with another erotic thriller in 2012, Passion. That film was even more of an anachronism and didn’t have an American theatrical release – it went straight to video.)

The erotic thriller genre is a subcategory of film noir in which illicit love and sexual fantasy are accompanied by danger.  In essence, the genre is moralistic: the penalty for engaging in forbidden sexual fantasies is, often, blackmail, humiliating disclosure, and death.  The films invoke a “pleasure/danger” principle –indulging in pleasure leads to danger.  

Prototypical pictures in the genre are Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (also 1944)   Both of these archetypes involve a femme fatale who ensnares and destroys a hapless, gullible man.  The genre was revived forty years after these prototypes with Body Heat (1980) and the big budget productions Basic Instinct (1987) and Fatal Attraction (1992).  There was “gold in them thar hills” and literally hundreds of pictures were made recapitulating themes asserting that illicit sex = danger.  (It’s no accident that these movies arose in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.)  Between 1992 and 2000, it’s estimated that more than 700 erotic thrillers were produced, almost all of them direct-to-video.  In 1996, the Wachowsky sisters (then, brothers before their sex-change operations) released Bound, probably the most influential of erotic thrillers featuring lesbian lovers in a BDSM context.  But around 2000, several high profile films invoking tropes of the erotic thriller, Showgirls and Jade failed conspicuously at the box office.  These disappointments were instrumental in bringing the genre to an end.  

4.

Femme Fatale exposes a fundamental disconnect, an incongruity, between means and ends.  De Palma’s film employs sophisticated high-art imagery – cinephiles will note dream imagery involving overflowing water derived from films by Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman; the use of the same actress to play multiple parts hints at how personality may be interchangeable, how characters, under pressure, can fuse together – this is the theme of pictures like Bergman’s Persona.  The elaborate, high-gloss camerawork mirrors work by Alain Resnais and the deployment of split screen imagery channels De Palma’s early work in Blow-Out and Dressed to Kill.  The interface between dream and reality is obsessively detailed, built from a mosaic of small, almost invisible, details: for instance, casual encounters with minor figures in the context of the diamond heist trigger the appearance of those same people in roles in the dream and a poster showing Millais’ pre-Raphaelite painting of Orphelia drowning (marked Deja Vu) appears repeatedly in the dream scenes as well. (The dream effects are similar to sequences in Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Wild Strawberries).  Locations and set design subtly signify that something is “off”, unreal and stylized in the lengthy dream that comprises most of the picture – these aspects of the film signal an exploration of the difference between appearance and reality that has a labyrinthine intricacy; it’s like Borges’ metaphor of the man who dreams of a butterfly who just might be a butterfly dreaming that it is a man.  Movies are dream-works; this movie has a movie within a movie and the location for the heist, the Cannes Film Festival, establishes a self-referential aspect to Femme Fatale – the movie, like Wenders’ The State of Things or Truffaut’s Day for Night, is about the process of making movies.  All of this exquisite detail, symbolism, and elaborate film technique, however, is in service of amplifying the effects of what is fundamentally a fifties’ style film noir, that is, a B-picture made cheaply to be shown as a the lower-half of double feature.  This is made manifest in the opening sequence in the which the titular femme fatale watches Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck appearing together in one of the signature works of film noir, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).  The disconnect apparent in Femme Fatale is the use of lavishly extravagant and sophisticated film technique to limn what is essentially trashy, pulp-grade material.    

Standard film noir is disposable, little cheap pictures made to be seen once and, then, forgotten.  But Femme Fatale is so complex that it demands to be seen twice or more – the details can’t be fully grasped until the movie’s plot is revealed and, since the plot is occult (that is, hidden), the viewer is forced to reconsider radically what he or she has seen earlier once the film’s “trick” has been revealed.  The film’s French trailer exploits this aspect of Femme Fatale: the coming attractions trailer ends with the words printed on the screen: “Maybe, you didn’t get it” and, then, “Try again!” thereby suggesting that the movie has to be seen, at least, twice to be understood.  This is highly unusual in the context of expendable, low-budget film noir.

Femme Fatale and most of De Palma’s smaller scale pictures are elaborate puzzles that pose the question as to whether the solution to the riddle is worth the effort required to discover it.  These films embody Pauline Kael’s fundamental thesis that movies are, at heart, vulgar, middle-brow entertainment and pretensions to the contrary, that is pretensions of “art” or “artistic quality” are inimical to popular films.  The art is slathered onto some pretty raw and fundamental stuff about lust, desire, and greed.

5.

De Palma returned to surrealist film noir in 2012 with his picture Passion.  The movie is a French-German co-production produced by a French-speaking Tunisian Said Ben Said.  The budget was low, although the film had sufficient resources to cast Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace as the picture’s dueling bitch goddesses.  In Passion, De Palma amplifies the content of Femme Fatale to its essential reductio ad absurdum: there are no men of any significance in the film which features extended lesbian kissing sequences between the beautiful leading ladies, schematically reduced to a glacial ice-blonde in the Hitchcock mode and a dark-haired temptress.  The tone of the film is wildly uneven oscillating between elaborately choreographed aria-like sequences and low comedy involving bumpkin Berlin cops trying to entrap the murderess.  The film is not a success in many respects but, nonetheless, is an engrossing spectacle to those who know and admire De Palma.  I cite this picture because of an excellent review posted by Peter Sobczinski on Roger Ebert’s website (RogerEbert.com).  Sobczinski follows his mentor’s practice of praising De Palma.  He observes that the movie is best interpreted as a musical composition – images are used musically to create mood and establish an aura of fatality and doom.  Sobczinski notes that you can’t decode musical themes or motifs in non-musical terms.  Therefore, its is futile to attempt to interpret Passion (or any of De Palma’s fully realized erotic thrillers) is literary terms.  We might think of “themes” as being complexes of meaning such as the role of women in society, misogyny, sexual repression versus sexual expression and so on.  But this would be misguided.  De Palma’s work in his personal films isn’t thematic in this sense: the themes in his movies can be specified not in terms of content but as formal devices: the analytical overhead shot, the Steadi-cam tracking up or down steps, a crane shot that suddenly pulls away from a salient detail or that descends into a close-up, close shots that provide details or show eyes glaring into the camera, the swooning camera spinning a circle around protagonists, super-saturated colors, time suddenly slowing as a result of slow motion, and so on – none of these technical devices have literary or subject matter content; rather, they are technical motifs like musical phrases from which De Palma constructs his movies.    

Passion wasn’t theatrically released in the United States.  It went straight to video.

6.

“Row, Row, Row your Boat” is a children’s song, frequently performed as a round or canon.  The lyrics are: “Row, row, row your boat / Gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily / Life is but a dream.”  I have always wondered about the origins of this haunting song.

Most writers aver that the lyrics are a nursery rhyme, a little poem whose origins can’t be traced.  I’m not so sure about that.  The song was first printed in 1852 in a book of children’s songs.  (Curiously, this book is never exactly identified and the identify of its author not specified.)  The lyrics were printed in the form in which they appear above but the accompanying music is said to be “very different.”  The version of the melody that is current today was written by a pedagogue named Eliphalet Oman Lyte (1842 - 1913).  Lyte was born to Quaker stock in the old village of Bird-in-the-Hand near Lancaster, Pennsylvania – he was a grammar and composition teacher.  The song appears in his book The Franklin Square Song Collection published in New York in 1881.  The tune can be performed as a four-part canon beginning with a soprano voice, followed by alto, tenor, and, at last bass.  When performed in this way, the song encompasses the entire range of human voices and, accordingly, seems to suggest a universal message – all life is a dream.  Some commentators find inspirational and, even, spiritual meaning in the tune – these writers focus on the adverbs “gently” and “merrily.”  Of course, the folk culture of children have developed innumerable profane, violent, or simply silly variants on the lyrics: “Row, row, row, your boat / Gently down the stream / Throw the teacher in the creek / And listen to her scream.”

You can see Ella Fitzgerald with Bing Crosby singing several nursery rhymes as a duet.  They perform “London Bridge is falling down,” “Row, row, row your boat”, “Three Blind Mice,” and “Frere Jacques”.  The YouTube duet dates from 1950 and is worth watching.  

Passion

 As his penultimate film, Brian De Palma's Passion (2012) is valedictory, a farewell, it seems, to the exorbitant baroque thrillers and horror films on which the director built his reputation. It would be nice to claim that the movie is some kind of masterpiece, but, in fact, it's interesting primarily as the distillation of themes that the director has explored in other better movies.  In this context, the term "themes" is too literary and suggests that there is a sensibility at work in De Palma's best pictures that that operates on the basis of ideas.  A "theme" as used in this note doesn't mean a subject or concept that is developed as an idea -- rather, the term "theme" here invokes music:  De Palma's themes are atmospheric, pictorial, tics involving color and motion and choreographed camera movements, analytical vertical shots derived from Hitchcock, Steadi-cam tracking shots gliding up and down stairs or spinning vertiginously around characters, crane shots slipping and sliding over the heads of the actors, elaborate split-screen imagery conveying simultaneity of two or three actions at once, enormous brooding close-ups of eyes and mouth, and disconcerting point-of-view imagery This lush and voluptuous way of staging scenes is combined with lurid, feverish sex and violence.  Furthermore, nothing is really original in the best work by De Palma -- he proceeds by way of lavish and intricate webs of allusions to other movies, including, in his late work, his own earlier films.  Passion reprises De Palma's whole career and all its aspects:  there are homicidal twin sisters, overheated lesbian sex scenes, nightmares and dreams nested within dreams, entire sequences play like hallucinations, and, in the film's last forty minutes, the audience is continuously disoriented, wondering whether what we are seeing in some version of reality or, rather, someone's nightmare, or, even, more bizarre, a surrealist film subversively inserted into a standard variety erotic thriller -- that is, not even, necessarily, a dream within a dream, but a Godard-style pastiche of other films.  Everything is citation and intertextual allusion.  Passion is always compelling and entertaining, but you can't figure out what is going on and I would be hard-pressed to summarize the movie's post-modern Expressionist plot.

As far as I can determine the movie involves an ice blonde (of the Hitchcock variety) in conflict with dark-haired woman.  The color scheme is as emphatic as in a late Kurosawa movie with marching color-coded armies.  Both women are casually vicious and conniving.  Blonde and Dark Hair work at an advertising agency located in Berlin for some reason.  (By this stage in his career, De Palma, once one of the most sought after directors in Hollywood, couldn't raise money in the United States:  Passion is a German- French coproduction with a producer call Said Ben Said -- it had only a limited release in the United States and went, I think, straight-to-video.) In an ultimate parody of Hitchcock's extravagant point-of-view mise-en-scene, Dark Hair creates an ad involving something called "Ass-Cam" -- this is a cell-phone perched on a girl's rump that registers the admiring and lecherous responses of people to her ultra-tight jeans.  The notion is witty and deconstructs Hitchcock shooting scenes from the POV of his characters -- for instance, a suicide filmed with the muzzle of the gun turned inward to the camera. The ad turns out to be a huge success but Blonde takes credit for the idea to the dismay of Dark Hair.  Dark Hair revenges herself on Blonde by sleeping with all of Blonde's disreputable boy-toy lovers.  Blonde wants to be transferred to New York but, when the true provenance of the Ass-Cam ad is discovered, Dark Hair gets a promotion and is offered a transfer to New York City.  This triggers a feud between the two women that results in public humiliation and ultimately murder.  Complicating the situation is a strong Lesbian subtext between the women involving much kissing and innuendo.  Further, there is a Redhead who yearns for Dark Hair and conspires with her against Blonde.  The women tell exotic lies about their background, portraying themselves as victims of various kind of fictional trauma.  After the manner of Bergman's Persona, also a theme in De Palma's previous picture Femme Fatale (2002), the females characters bleed into one another and there are dream-like sequences in which one woman acts the part of another -- personalities which seem psychopathic and murderous all seem fused together.  Ultimately, Blonde is murdered and Dark Hair accused of the crime.  By this point, Dark Hair has suffered a psychotic break and is popping pills like candy, drifting in and out of consciousness as cartoonish German cops interrogate and pursue her.  The last sequences in the film are shot through the consciousness and POV of the drugged and crazy Dark Hair and, therefore, confusing and highly stylized.  (And, in a final twist, it turns out that De Palma has deceived us -- the delirious POV of the supposedly drugged Dark Hair turns out to be an indirection; in fact, Dark Hair is only pretending to be impaired and, therefore, the POV to which we are privy is completely unreliable; purporting to show us how Dark Hair seems the world, in fact, this is just another post-modern fiction -- she doesn't see the world the way it is represented to us at all.  This seems sort of a cheat, but De Palma pulls out all the stops to disorient, confuse, and startle his viewers.)  The movie involves blackmail, throat-slashing, people getting strangled and lots of sex, some of it filmed by cellphone.  There are fashion shows and lavishly glamorous images of luxury apartments and corporate conference rooms.  Everything is high-gloss and bright until the film dips in the purported POV of Dark Hair -- then, the color scheme turns to grey and pale blues with striped shadows falling across everyone like the stripes on a prisoner's jump-suit in an old Hollywood movie.  All of this is accompanied by a lavish, swooning score.  

The film is epitomized by a bravura sequence in which De Palma intercuts Dark Hair attending a performance of a ballet to Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun", with a drunken confrontation between Blonde and her disgruntled lover, Dirk -- there are three strands to this imagery:  huge ominous close-ups of Dark Hair's eyes  the ballet shot from various expressive angles, and the inebriated man stumbling around Blonde's property while she prepares herself for a sado-masochistic tryst.  The music pours syrup all over the pictures and De Palma uses a persistent split-screen with the edge of the image sometimes migrating one way or another to orchestrate the three streams of imagery.  It's extremely impressive but the device doesn't really signify anything and I don't know what the Debussy has to do with the movie and, finally, at the end of the film, we are informed that the whole sequence was shot and presented in such a way to once again deceive the audience as to what is going on.  The cubist approach to reality represented by the split-screen sequences isn't analytical -- in fact, the fragmentation of the image and the parallel cutting is just another device to seduce the eye but deceive the mind.

I liked this movie but I can't really recommend it.  It's too footnoted with allusions to other films and too claustrophobic -- you feel like you stuck inside De Palma's head.  To call the acting cartoonish is to insult cartoons.  The dialogue is stilted and artificial and the two lead characters have almost no personality other than grimly portrayed lust and anger.  There is no one in this movie about whom you could possibly give a damn.  The two vipers, Blonde and Dark Hair are played by Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace respectively.    

Seven Chances

 Seven Chances is a Buster Keaton comedy only an hour long but anything but modest in its ambitious deployment of an army of extras and elaborate practical special effects.  The film illustrates how Hollywood budgets transformed even bits of movie persiflage into spectacles of gratuitous grandeur.  The picture is shot like a war movie -- it's not really funny except in concept and the concept is mostly founded on the disproportion between the trifling plot and the grandiose execution.

Keaton is a stockbroker who, with his sidekick, has either stolen money or lost a great amount of his client's funds.  As they despair, a simian lawyer appears, a little figure with a chimpanzee's features who looks a bit like Henry Gibson.  The lawyer announces that Keaton has inherited a huge sum of money contingent upon him marrying before seven pm on his 27th birthday -- as it happens, this is the very day that the lawyer delivers his message.  Keaton has a girlfriend but has been too shy to propose to her.  With the legacy at issue, he rushes to that young woman and proposes marriage, botching the transaction so that she angrily rejects him.  (Later, she regrets her anger and sends a comic "darky" to find Keaton; the servant is played in blackface and posited to be both shiftless and incompetent.)  Keaton and his buddy go to their country club and he offers to marry a variety of women, all of whom mock him and reject his proposal.  Wandering the streets, Keaton approaches women who are ever more inappropriate mismatches.  When he sits on a bench and eyes a homely girl, she lifts to her face a newspaper printed in Hebrew.  With this gag, we know that the inevitable racist joke will rapidly follow -- and, indeed, the movie doesn't disappoint in this respect.  (The film is casually noxious.)  Ultimately, Keaton ends up approaching a cross-dresser, a scene that is implied but not shown and this demonstrates that his effort at finding a bride will inevitably failure.  The "darky" messenger continues his ambling pursuit of Keaton on an old nag, but can't catch up to him.  Keaton's sidekick posts flyers all over town indicating that Keaton intends to wed at 5:30 pm at a certain church downtown.  At this point, the film shifts into its surrealist epic mode.  Thousands of women, all of them wearing bridal garments, converge at the church.  The women pursue Keaton who flees through the city and its desolate suburbs.  Enormous armies of women, all in white gowns with white bonnets, swarm over the landscape.  Keaton runs like an Olympic sprinter and, ultimately, the chase ends in a wilderness of gorges and high stony hills.  Dashing down a rock-strewn declivity, the hero starts a landslide of hundreds of boulders.  He dodges the boulders as he rushes down an endless hill into a valley where the waiting army of brides is decimated by the rocks bouncing down the slope.  At last, Keaton reaches a church where his girlfriend is patiently waiting and, after a scare as to the time -- the wedding has be before 7:00 pm -- all ends happily.  

The final fifteen minutes of the movie is conceived on a colossal scale and the sequence involving hundreds of boulders raining down the hillside is astonishing -- it was done, I understand, with paper-mache rocks, some of them as big as small cottages.  There are some endearing running gags -- Keaton's girlfriend has a tiny puppy on her leash when he first considers proposing to her but is to shy to utter the words -- by the end of the movie, in keeping with the film's exaggerated mise-en-scene, the dog has grown to Great Dane as large as a horse.  The physical gags are not as impressive as some of the stunts in Keaton's other movies, but the actor runs at impressive speed, plunges down hillsides with alacrity, and dodges the careening boulders like a ballet dancer.  (The opening montage involving Keaton's courtship of his patient girlfriend is shot in two-tone technicolor.  The film's title refers to a David Belasco-produced play from which the 1925 film is adapted.  There is not much in the movie justifying the title except for a list of seven marital candidates at the Country Club to whom Keaton presses his suit.)

Dream Scenario

 There are a lot of ideas in Dream Scenario (2023, Kristoffer Borgli), but they don't exactly gel.  The movie seems to be about celebrity, internet influencers, and the specious blandishments of fame.  These themes are developed by way of an outre occult narrative that raises more questions than it answers.  One has the suspicion that these ideas could be explored more persuasively without the aura of mystery intrinsic to the movie.  Ultimately, the picture's premise turns out to be a distraction since the real concerns of the movie are rather remote from its narrative.

Professor Paul Matthews teaches something like evolutionary biology at a small private college.  He's happily married, has two teenage daughters, and, like many in academia, is rather indolent and feckless -- he has been working on a book about insect intelligence, something he calls "antintelligence" for years except that he has never come around to putting his ideas on paper.  Suddenly, without explanation, he starts appearing as a bemused observer in people's dreams.  The phenomenon is widespread and Matthews becomes an instant celebrity.  People want selfies with him; his students regard his lectures as chances to rub shoulders with a famous figure -- although he's famous purely for standing on the sidelines in people's dreams.  Matthews flies to the big city where he is courted by an internet advertising agency -- they are trying to set up a meeting with the Obamas and suggest that he become a pitchman for Sprite.  (Matthews insists that the agency assist him in publishing his book about insect evolution -- they are less than enthused about this project).  One of the young women at the agency has been having torrid erotic dreams about Matthews.  She tries to seduce him with comically disastrous results -- he farts uncontrollably and ejaculates the moment she unzips his pants; the gap between dream and reality here is an uncomfortable chasm.  After this mishap, Matthews dream-appearances become sinister -- now, he is a nightmare figure haunting people's dreams as a sadistic torturing monster.  As can happen with internet fame, his celebrity turns dark in a heartbeat -- he is maligned, beaten up in restaurants, and loses, first, his job and, then, his wife.  Matthews leaves the country for PR tour in France -- his book has been published through the Agency as I am your Nightmare.  (Matthews wanted the book to be named Dream Scenario)  Matthews poses with bayonet-taloned gauntlet of Freddy Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.  Gradually, he ceases appearing in people's dreams and his "fifteen minutes of fame" is at an end.   Scientists have studied the phenomenon of his dream appearance and conclude that Jung's notion of the collective unconscious is verifiable.  In fact, a high-tech company has developed a product called the Norio, a wristband that lets you enter the dreams of other sleepers.  Matthews has a Norio and, in the film's last scene, seems to enter his divorced wife's dream in which he and she are briefly compatible, and, even, happy together.  (The identity of the dreamer in the last scene is ambiguous -- it may be that Matthews is simply experiencing a wish-fulfillment dream about his wife.)

The movie is unassuming, anchored by a uncharacteristically restrained performance by Nicholas Cage as Paul Matthews.  He looks morose through most of the film and suffers a series of humiliations at the hands of colleagues and women -- for instance, his theory of "antintelligence" is stolen by a female colleague. (This subplot goes nowhere and isn't tied to the movie's plot.)  There are a number of eerie dream sequences, also understated, and, therefore, I think all the more effective.  Matthews starts the film as the sort of unpretentious nebbish teacher that his more accomplished colleagues don't invite to their parties.  The idea of the film is clever and interesting but the material is somewhat thin -- the movie's concept is explored at length and there are a number of scenes that don't really go anywhere.  Examples are a dinner-party scene in which the host's wife flees the table at the sight of Matthews -- it's painful and embarrassing but doesn't add much to the story; similarly, there's an attempt by a professional therapist to use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to acclimate Matthews' students to his presence after his dream appearances have become garishly nightmarish -- predictably this fails.  Dream Scenario is not a long movie but feels oddly padded.  There's some suggestion that the whole thing is just a dream -- in a couple shots, posited as waking life, we see leaves falling inexplicably in the corner of the frame; falling leaves signify dreaming in some scenes.  The landscape is vivid with bright autumnal colors, in fact, suspiciously vivid as if these images show dreamscapes.  When Matthews is thrown out of his house by his wife, he stays with a colleague in a dank basement with a florescent light that inexplicably can't be turned off.  Later, in Paris, Paul goes to a book signing also held for some reason in a basement corridor which looks like the rooms in his friend's cellar and also lit by a bright florescent light overhead.  Matthews asks his wife in an early scene if she dreams of him, wondering if she has erotic dreams in which he features.  She tells him that he appears in her dreams wearing the outsized suit featured in the Talking Heads concert doc, Stop Making Sense -- this big, bulky suit worn by David Byrne figures in the last scene in the movie, a fairly arcane reference, I think, for many younger viewers.  There are nice touches.  Paul meets the young woman at the Agency in a bar on Halloween and we see various people with gruesome fake wounds and, even, a man who is made up to look just like Paul -- he has become so famous that people impersonate him on Halloween.  (This is before he starts starring in dreams as a sadistic monster.)  One theme of the movie has to do with zebras:  zebras look conspicuous in order to blend in with their herd -- a predator can attack a single animal but not a herd.  Zebra imagery is visible in a number of scenes and Paul keeps a picture of a zebra on his bookshelf.  This suggests that we all blend in with our herd, a sort of protective coloration, but when we are exposed by the internet, "doxed" as it were, we are liable to become prey.  

Dream Scenario is well-written and intriguing.  Much of the dialogue, particularly Paul's tendency to whine, is similar to the brittle, hyper-literate way people talk in a Woody Allen movie.  But there's something wrong with the movie -- it doesn't land exactly right.  I think the problem is that the premise overwhelms the picture and, once, it is established, the movie has nowhere to go.  (The movie is directed by Kristoffer Borgli, a Norwegian filmmaker, and produced by Ari Aster.0

The Love of Jeanne Ney (film group note)

 

If within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times, almost as often as his suits, he still does not change his heart; he has but one.

Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs 

1.

Even before the publication of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel The Director, a fictional account of G. W. Pabst’s life and work between 1934 and his death in 1967, the Austrian filmmaker was perceived as fatally compromised by his return to Nazi Germany and the movies he made under that regime.  Kehlmann’s book, however, is decisive in its representation of Pabst as an artist who lost his way, made a Faustian deal with the National Socialists, and, thereby, sold his soul to Fascism.  None of this is exactly true or fair – but Art has its own logic and makes mythology from the raw evidence of biography and history.  

Pabst’s problem was that he left Germany and the film industry in Berlin for Hollywood, failed to thrive in la-la-land, and, after an inconsequential sojourn in Paris, returned to Nazi Germany where he worked under the supervision of Josef Goebbels.  Most of the other great figures active in the Weimar Republic film industry fled Germany never to return.  Fritz Lang escaped in 1933, allegedly on the eve of an interview with Goebbels about his role in the National Socialist film industry – Lang didn’t return to West Germany until the early sixties, after a successful career in Hollywood.  F. W. Murnau left Berlin for Hollywood before the storm, working for Fox Studios, on his masterpiece Sunrise, released in 1927, the same year that The Love of Jeanne Ney premiered.  (Murnau avoided further compromise by the simplest and most decisive of expedients – he died in a car crash near Santa Barbara in 1931.)  Ernst Lubitsch, who was Jewish, had emigrated to Hollywood in 1922 and never looked back.  Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk (Detlev Sierck) fled to Los Angeles and established themselves in the German emigre film community.  Thousands of actors and technicians also left Germany after the collapse of the Weimar Republic.  The genre of the horror film, particularly as practiced at Universal Studios, is largely the invention of German film workers living in self-imposed exile in Los Angeles.  The situation was similar in the other arts: Brecht found himself collaborating on screenplays in Hollywood, Schoenberg and other composers from the German-speaking world also took up residence in Los Angeles. Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel both ended-up, with numerous other refugees, in southern California. Many of these figures, if they survived the War and the worst of the post-war reconstruction of Germany, returned ultimately to Europe.  Pabst’s infamy resides in the fact that a mixture of vanity and accident stranded him in Germany or, more accurately stated, his home country of Austria (called Ostmark under the Nazis) where he remained for the duration of the war and, even, lent his talents to the fascist regime.  

Pabst’s work in the Nazi film industry is imbued with a particularly sinister irony because the director had been known as a man of the Left, indeed, a filmmaker with pronounced Communist inclinations.  Just before making The Love of Jeanne Ney, Pabst had joined two Leftist groups, including the radical Bund, an avowedly Marxist league of film professionals.  The Love of Jeanne Ney adapts a novel by the Bolshevik writer Ilya Ehrenburg and contains many Soviet elements, including instances of dialectical montage in the style of Eisenstein.  Pabst later collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on The Three Penny Opera, a work with an explicit Communist moral.  Indeed, Pabst’s commitment to Left-wing causes was such that he was nicknamed Der Rote Pabst (“the Red Pope” – the name Pabst means “Pope” in German).  

Pabst’s admiration of Soviet cinema led him to propose a German re-make of Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin.  In Pabst’s scenario, the proposed film depicts a revolt among Communist-inspired sailors in the harbor city of Kiel.  (Eisenstein’s Potemkin concerns a sailor’s mutiny in the port of Odessa; a mutiny of sailors in the German navy on November 1 and 2, 1918 led to a Leftist revolt that spread from Kiel throughout northern Germany and triggering the abdication of the Kaiser and the formation of the Weimar Republic.)  The movie was a bridge too far and never was made.  But allusions to Potemkin and the events in November 1918 abound in the first part of Jeanne Ney.  The film’s hero is a Bolshevik agitator, a leader in a revolt against the White Russians in Odessa and the Crimea.  A scene in the film is actually staged on a part of what seems to be the famous Odessa steps that feature in the climactic massacre in Potemkin. And, later, in the film, the Bolshevik, Andreas, is dispatched from Paris to Toulon to lead Communist revolutionary activity in that military harbor city where, probably not coincidentally, Leftist sailors later participated in a bloody rebellion in August 1935.

Pabst’s Bolshevik sympathies are evident, as well, in his selection of Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel The Love of Jeanne Ney for his 1927 film.  Ehrenburg, born in Kiev in 1891, was a Communist writer with impeccable revolutionary credentials.  When he was 17, the Tsarist secret police detained him and knocked out half of his teeth.  He was exiled to Paris for his Leftist political activities where he met Lenin as well as Picasso, Cocteau, and Diego Rivera.  Ehrenburg returned to Russia during the October Revolution but was appalled by the street fighting.  It is said that he spent most of his time there cowering in his hotel room.  Later, he covered the Russian civil war between the Whites and the Reds, the subject of the opening scenes in the movie.  Although initially anti-Bolshevik, Ehrenburg drifted toward the Soviet Communists.  Living in Berlin in 1923, he published three novels including The Love of Jeanne Ney.  The book, a popular success, concerned the love of French bourgeois girl (Jeanne Ney) for a dashing Communist subversive, assigned to lead a revolt in Toulon.  The provocateur (Andreas) is framed for a crime and arrested; he chooses to die rather than reveal his mission.  (Doubleday published the book in America in an English translation in 1930.)  Ehrenburg turned out to be a clever and opportunistic political chameleon – he survived Stalin’s terror and World War Two in which he called for the extermination of all Germans.  (Photographs show him with Malraux and Hemingway as well as people like Cocteau – Ehrenburg, who detested Americans, said that the only contributions to civilization made by America were Hemingway and Chesterfield cigarettes.)  He wrote an important novel after Stalin’s death called The Thaw, signifying the relaxation of the repression in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950's.  Ehrenburg died in 1967 and is buried in Moscow under a tombstone bearing a replica of Picasso’s sketch of his face.  

As it happened, Ehrenburg and Pabst quarreled bitterly over the script for Jeanne Ney.  Ehrenburg disliked and disavowed the “happy ending” Pabst imposed on the material – love reigns supreme with Andreas, the Bolshevik terrorist, cleared of the crime for which he has been framed and free to continue his romance with Jeanne Ney.  Even more offensive to Ehrenburg, a non-religious Jew, was the scene in the film in which Andreas and Jeanne enter a church and the Communist revolutionary is depicted kneeling with his girlfriend before an image of the Virgin Mary.  

The Love of Jeanne Ney isn’t mentioned by name in Kehlmann’s novel.  However, after the War, Soviet agents visit Pabst who is, then, living in Austria at his family estate (Dreiturm) and making schlock commercial films, in particular Geheimnessvolle Tiefen (“The Mysterious Depths”), a romance about cave explorers in the Alps.  Pabst, who is depressed and a shadow of his former self, impresses the Soviet police by alluding to his work with the famous Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg:  

“Once some Soviet officers appeared following up on a tip: Someone had anonymously informed the occupation authorities that the lord of Dreiturm castle (Pabst) had been a creator of Nazi films, a member of the Reichsfilmkammer (Reich Film Commission) and a favorite of the Minister of Propaganda – but, when this happened, for an hour, Pabst’s old personality was back in evidence.  He graciously provided the men with vodka and told them that, once, people had called him the Roten Pabst and that he had filmed works by the Soviet author Ehrenburg and Brecht as well.  He had been so charming and convincing that the officer embraced him when they departed.”

2.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst was born in Raudnitz, Bohemia, then, part of Austria-Hungary in August 1885.  His father was a railroad official.  Pabst studied drama in Vienna and, when he was 25, traveled to the United States as an actor and director of a German-language theater group in New York City.  Returning to Germany after a couple years, he was swept up in World War One, almost immediately captured, and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp on an island off the coast near Brest in Normandy.  While interned as a prisoner, Pabst directed several plays produced in French by the POWs.  After the war, Pabst returned to Vienna where he directed plays in an avant-garde theater, beginning around 1919.  After a brief apprenticeship as an assistant director, Pabst made his first feature film, The Treasure, in 1923.  The movie can be seen on the internet.  It is a somewhat slow-moving and thoroughly expressionistic picture with elaborate set decoration, gloomy chiaroscuro camera-work, painted shadows, and medieval/gothic stylings.  (The Treasure is the only purely expressionistic film that Pabst made.)

Pabst’s breakthrough pictures is The Joyless Street (1925).  In that film, a study of a young woman forced into prostitution by economic conditions (one woman exchanges sex for meat at a Viennese butcher shop), Pabst presents as an ingenue, the Swedish actress Greta Garbo.  (The film also stars Asta Nielsen).  Due in part to Garbo’s luminous presence, the film was a box-office success.  Although lit expressionistically, the film is generally described as an example of die Neue Sachlichkeit (“the new Objectivity”) in film.  Pabst followed The Joyless Street with a succession of films that are regarded as landmarks in Weimar Cinema.  Secrets of a Soul (1926) is a precise, and frightening, attempt to dramatize Freudian psychological theory – it’s remarkably good.  The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) is said to be a “culminating” work in silent cinema, a sort of compendium of different approaches to filmmaking as it had evolved just prior to the inception of sound films.  Pabst, then, made two final silent pictures starring the American actress (she was Ziegfeld girl who hailed from Kansas City), Louise Brooks – these are Pandora’s Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl.  Working with Bertolt Brecht, Pabst directed his first sound film, The Threepenny Opera, 1931. (This film is notable for preserving the performance of the great Berlin singer and cabaret performer, Lotte Lenya). West Front 1918 is a harrowing anti-war picture – it was also released with sound, although most of the footage was shot in silent format; the picture reached the public in 1930.  Also heavily inflected with internationalist, anti-war sentiment is Pabst’s Kameradschaft (“Cameraderie”) first shown in 1931.  Kameradschaft, a very impressive and spectacular film, is about a coal dust explosion in a mine near the border between France and Germany; when French miners are trapped underground, German workers tunnel under the border between the two countries to rescue their “comrades.”  (Although inspiring, the film is clear-sighted about national borders – after the rescue mission, the respective governments of France and Germany install a barrier underground, a wall in the tunnel between the two countries.)  Pabst, then, made a version of Don Quixote (1933) starring the famous Russian opera singer, the bass Feodor Chaliapin. (These pictures were international co-productions, made with American money and shot with French, German, and Russian crews.)  During this same time, Pabst also worked as co-director with Arnold Fanck to made The White Hell of Pitz Palu, a classic “mountain film” (Bergfilm) with young lovers stranded in a blizzard on the glaciers of the might peak, Pitz Palu.  (The film features the World War One ace fighter pilot, Ernst Udet, who lands his biplane on an ice-field to rescue the stranded climbers.  Leni Riefenstahl plays the romantic interest in the film – this was the movie that catapulted her to success.)  This picture is very spectacular and exciting and holds up well today as an adventure movie. The film’s production was arduous – it was all shot on location and Pabst,who suffered acrophobia (fear of heights), almost froze to death.  

With the Nazi ascent to power Pabst (known then as “the Red Pabst) thought it prudent to leave the imploding Weimar Republic.  He went to Hollywood where he made A Modern Hero (1934), a failure.  Unable to secure directing positions in Los Angeles, Pabst moved to Paris where he made several films, none of them particularly impressive. Pabst’s mother remained in Austria and was in ill-health.  Accordingly, Pabst returned with his family to Vienna and its environs, planning to put his elderly mother in a nursing home.  But war was declared and Pabst found himself trapped in Austria at that time re-named Ostmark after the Anschluss with the Nazi regime.  Joseph Goebbels summoned Pabst to Berlin.  The Propaganda and Culture Minister persuaded Pabst to work in Berlin under his direction.  In Nazi Germany, Pabst made The Comedians, a lavishly produced period piece released in 1941.  In 1943, he directed another spectacular period piece Paracelsus about the early renaissance magician, occultist, and healer.  During this time, Pabst was also recruited to help with Leni Riefenstahl’s massive and expensive production of Tiefland, a picture that was never fully completed.  As the noose was tightening around the Third Reich, bombing raids closed the studios as UFA in Neu Babelsberg, a Berlin suburb, and forced Pabst to work on his film Der Fall Molander (“The Molander Case”) at Barradanov Studios in Prague.  This film was also lavishly produced, an adaptation of a crime novel by one of the Reich’s pet authors, but its final cut has been wholly lost – notwithstanding rumors about elements from the film being retained by either the Russian army or a film archive in Prague.  

Post-war, Pabst was regarded with suspicion because of his work for Goebbels.  However, Pabst’s Nazi-era pictures are relatively subtle and propaganda elements in the films are mostly concealed, a matter of sub rosa implications.  Pabst made several virtuous anti-Fascist films in the late forties and early fifties including a depiction of the Stauffenberg attempt to assassinate Hitler, a picture about the persecution of Jews (The Trial), and a bunker movie released in English as The Last Ten Days.  Here is where Pabst’s filmography in English-language accounts comes to an end.  But, in fact, Pabst made another eight or nine films, including a spelunking adventure picture written by his wife Gertrude Pabst – this film, called Geheimnisvolle Tiefen (“Mysterious Depths”) was shot in difficult circumstances in an Alpine ice cave and seems similar in form and plot to The White Hell of Pitz Palu – young lovers go astray underground and have to be saved.  Pabst directed some operas, including a notable 1953 version of Aida with Maria Callas.  He lived until 1967 when he died in Vienna. 

3.

The critic Jim Hoberman, formerly the movie reviewer for the Village Voice, describes The Love of Jeanne Ney as a “culminating work in the silent cinema.”  By this Hoberman means that The Love of Jeanne Ney incorporates various aspects and styles of silent filmmaking in their fully evolved form.  Pabst’s commitment seems to be to maximizing the expressive force of the narrative that he presents.  In just about every shot, therefore, Pabst provides not only the minimum information necessary to drive the plot forward but, also, additional and surprising details that are excessive, that augment and, even, call into question the narrative.  In addition, Pabst is a great curator of faces and human expressions; he freights the movie with beautiful, striking, and grotesque faces and animates them with lust or anger or fear.  Pabst seems to combine realistic modes of representation with histrionic melodrama.  The effect is that the film presents a montage of imagery that seems unstable, swinging between comedy, even farce, documentary objectivity, and operatic melodrama.  

Consider as an example a scene in which the cell of Communist provocateurs is raided by the police.  The Bolsheviks, including Andreas, seem to be in some sort of underground corridor – it looks like a beer cave.  Warned at the last moment that the cops are advancing, the Communists try to exit a basement window.  One of them is grabbed by his legs and yanked down from the window through which he is trying to wriggle free.  (These shots have a vaguely slapstick tone to them.)  The sequence, then, cuts to an exterior, seemingly an alley above the underground passage through which the agents have escaped.  We see a figure fleeing through the alley.  This shot, mundane in its subject – a man flees along the street – however, contains strange, inexplicable overtones.  The alleyway emerges from some sort of dark shelter with a very high, pointed (pitched) roof.  The interior of this shelter is shadowy – we can’t see into it.  The steep, pitched roof and the heavy timber that seems to comprise this inexplicable structure (what is it?) imparts to the image a curious Gothic aspect, raising questions in the viewer’s mind as to what exactly we are seeing.  And those questions, which are largely subliminal, are never answered – Pabst doesn’t dispatch his camera into the dark grotto-like enclosure and we are not shown anything that assists in deciphering the image.  

In its “culminating” collage of styles and modes of representation, The Love of Jeanne Ney combines Hollywood mise-en-scene, chiefly in narrative scenes involving the detective agency and the subplot about the stolen diamond with Soviet dialectical montage – for instance, a close-up of a crown and imperial eagle suddenly dissolves into a large portrait of Vladimir Lenin posted on a wall.  Pabst films glimpses of the revolution after the manner of Eisenstein: workers heroically framed in muscular, densely edited tableaux.  But these idealized propaganda images are offset by realistically depicted imagery of war-torn Crimea, vistas of ruined villages and desolate streets.  When the revolutionaries are shown marching toward the camera, we see them trudging at double-time through a muddy puddle or stream.  There are instances of broad comedy – for instance, the aggrieved husband being presented with evidence of his wife’s infidelity in the detective offices of Raymond Ney.  Over-blown and, even, spectacular, documentary elements predominate in some sequences – Jeanne Ney and Andreas walk through vast Parisian squares teeming with commercial activity; these shots involve literally thousands of people – we have to engage in a “Where’s Waldo?” search with our eyes to pick out our protagonists among the commercial hubbub.  (These shots are doubly incongruous because they have been preceded by vistas of Paris streets eerily empty at dawn – this is the episode in the picture in which Andreas and Jeanne leave the hotel where they have spent the night.)  Pabst’s camera roams across the sets and urban landscapes to discover curious details – for instance, in the hotel scene, Jeanne and Andreas look across an air-shaft to a somewhat impoverished-looking suite where a wedding is underway; we see the groom pawing the bride and, then, there is an inexplicably moving close-up of her face, designed to show us tears flowing down her cheeks.  The wedding and bride have nothing to do with the story; and, in fact, the imagery doesn’t really comment on anything happening in the scene between Jeanne and Andreas – it’s hard to make any neat interpretation of the images involving the wedding, the forlorn bride, and, at dawn, one of the revelers sprawled drunkenly against the window frame. Toward the end of the film, the picture develops into a chase of the sort perfected by D. W. Griffith, the action of the train interrupted suddenly with grotesque comedy involving the old couple with the booze and the big truncheon-shaped sausage.  Pabst cuts on movement – he is one of the screen’s great editors.  Since movies are about movement, Pabst imports motion into scenes that don’t really require it – this is a gratuitous sort of gift to the audience.  When Andreas and Jeanne first meet in Paris, the sequence involves an elaborate ballet of big sedans moving on parallel tracks – the choreography suggests characters who belong in the same frame with one another but because of fences and the shape of Montmartre lanes, are held apart by the terrain.  Some parts of the film are purely expressionistic, archaic in presentation, as if artifacts of an earlier phase in the history of film.  When the repulsive Raymond Ney mimics receiving a fortune in reward money for the return of the diamond, the camera work, lighting and shadows, as well as the acting all become vividly and wildly expressionistic.  It’s as if Pabst is channeling scenes from Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and these elements in the movie have the same frenzied and embittered character as some of the most extreme aspects in that earlier film – in fact, Pabst’s mixture of grotesquerie and savage realism often resembles von Stroheim’s imagery in films like Greed, Blind Husbands, and Foolish Wives.  Like von Stroheim, Pabst also sometimes suggests various sorts of sexual perversity – some of the characters seems to be coded as gay in The Love of Jeanne Ney and, in the scene where Jeanne first encounters her bulbous-eyed leering uncle there is a strong suggestion that the man may have raped her at some earlier time. The scenes in which the lecherous Chalybjew tries to caress Jeanne while her blind sister, Gabrielle, is across the table have a startling, raw, and obscene energy.  

It’s worth commenting on two of the performances in the film: Brigitte Helm as the blind and helpless Gabrielle and Fritz Rasp as the villainous Chalybjew.  Brigitta Helm is most famous for the dual role that she played in Lang’s Metropolis (1926) – in that movie, she appears as a humble woman, Maria, who cares for the children of the enslaved workers in the city’s subterranean depths; seized by the evil sorcerer and mad scientist Rotwang, she is somehow cloned into a robot version of the saint-like Maria – the robot is a femme fatale, who winks lewdly at the camera, and poses half-naked in the debauched night clubs in Metropolis.  Lang goes so far as to equate the vamp Maria with the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation – in one spectacular scene, she rises out of the depths astride an apocalyptic beast.  As the pious, masochistic Maria, Helm slumps her shoulders and stoops, demonstrating extreme (if irritating) humility by her posture – it is Expressionistic acting par excellence.  She’s more compelling, if equally stylized as the lascivious robot-imposter.  Helm specialized in vamp roles – she is particularly famous for appearing topless on posters for the 1928 horror/science fiction picture Alraune – she plays a prostitute inseminated with the semen of a hanged man.  She also appears in Pabst’s strange 1932 Die Herrin von Atlantis (The Mistress of Atlantis) – in that film, she’s a nymphomaniacal man-slaying queen who rules over the subterranean kingdom of Atlantis, hidden beneath the sand dunes of the Sahara.  (Pabst made the movie for international markets in three versions – German, French, and English; it’s not easy to find legible DVDs of Atlantis, but, I watched it and believe it to be very impressive, a surreal fantasia involving harem girls, in one scene, listening to Offenbach’s “Can-Can” from Orpheus in the Underworld.)   During the Nazi era, Helm was one of Hitler’s favorite actresses – she made a number of comedies for the Fuehrer despite professing distaste for the regime.  She was a bad driver, often drunk, and was involved in several serious motor vehicle accidents that were “fixed” by the Nazi ministry of culture.  Later, she married an industrialist, retired to Sweden, and lived until 1996.  She retired from the film industry when she was married and made no pictures after 1935.  

Fritz Rasp, who plays the villain in The Love of Jeanne Ney, was one of the Expressionist era’s most successful character actors.  Born in 1891, he first appeared in silent films in 1916 and specialized in playing evil characters.  Pabst used him in Pandora’s Box, playing a bad guy again in The Diary of a Lost Girl, and cast him as Peachum, the villain in The Three Penny Opera (1930).  He’s in Lang’s Spione (“Spies”, 1928).  He continued to work as a heavy in German films for the rest of his career – he plays a murderer in The Murder of Dmitri Karamazov (1931) and even has the title role of Judas in the 1933 The Judas of Tyrol about a Swiss Passion Play.  Pabst used him again in his 1943 Paracelsus where he plays another villain.  Rasp continued to perform in German-language movies until the early seventies.  He died in 1976.  Rasp is one of the most instantly recognizable and dependably effectiveactors in German cinema. 

4.

Charlotte Beradt (1907 - 1986) was a journalist born Jewish in Brandenberg.  During the Weimar period, she wrote for women’s magazines and political periodicals.  Both she and her first husband (Heinz Pollak or Pol) were members of the Communist party with Spartacist affiliations.  She was a close friend to Hannah Arendt and may have shared a boyfriend with him.  After the Nazi rise to power, Beradt was prohibited from working as a journalist.  With her second husband, Martin Beradt, she emigrated to New York City via London, getting out of Germany just in the nick of time – she landed in New York harbor in 1940.  In New York, Charlotte Beradt initially worked as a hair dresser, running a salon out of her apartment.  In 1943, she published an English language essay about people’s dreams under the Nazi totalitarian regime.  Later, she worked for public radio, producing scripts in support of the Civil Rights movement.  She translated for publication four of Hannah Arendt’s war-time essays.

Beradt had begun to dream about Hitler and his cohort in 1933.  She was interested in psychoanalysis and wrote down her dreams.  Later, she collected dreams from various informants on the subject of the Nazi regime that were published with her analysis in a 1966 book written in German, Der Dritte Reich des Traums.  This book, on which her fame depends, was published in English translation in 1985 and, then, largely forgotten.  The German edition of the book was accompanied by a preface by the Freudian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim who was himself a concentration camp survivor.  Bettelheim’s introduction didn’t do the book any favors.  He dismissed Beradt’s compilation as shallow and incomplete; he said that the book had no dreams reported by Nazi true believers and, further, documented only the so-called “manifest content” of the dreams and not the personally significant “latent content” necessary for full analysis.  This sniffy and pedantic introduction demonstrates that Bettelheim didn’t understand Beradt’s intentions – she wasn’t interested in analyzing her informants but merely documenting how their dream imagery was affected by totalitarianism (“living in a world without walls,” as one of her sources told her).  Trump’s second ascent to power has made the book relevant once more – it was published this Spring in a new English translation and praised by no less than Zadie Smith in The London Review of Books. 

Beradt’s modest treatise is significant in the context of Kehlmann’s fictional account of Pabst’s fatal compromises with the Nazi power for which he worked as a filmmaker.  In Beradt’s book, her subject is the transformation of Gegner (those in opposition or resistence to Hitler) into so-called Mitlaeufer (“fellow travelers”).  Pabst never became a Nazi and expressed nothing but contempt for the regime both before returning to Germany and after the War.  But it didn’t matter – his compromises turned him into a Mitlaeufer, someone willing to go along with the regime while never accepting its political premises.  By not opposing the Nazis, he became complicit in their evil.  This is the great theme of Kehlmann’s novel The Director and, also, the subject matter of Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich in Dreams. 

5.

Because silent films didn’t require dubbing, these movies had become fully international by 1927 – only with the advent of sound did the industry splinter again into different linguistic markets.  UFA suffered serious financial losses during the inflationary period of Weimar Republic.  But the studio was bailed-out by American companies, Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) who assumed a share in its enterprises.  Both of these production firms infused millions of dollars into the ailing German film industry in 1926.  It is for this reason that The Love of Jeanne Ney shows a title indicating that the picture was produced by Parufamet – that is, “Par” for Paramount, UFA for the German company with its studios at Berlin Babelsberg, and “Met” for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The Naked Gun (2025)

 The Naked Gun re-boots a comedy franchise of the same name that expired about thirty years ago.  The picture is quite funny.  I saw it in a movie theater, primarily so I could gage the reactions of the audience.  (It's notoriously hard to assess comedy if you watch it by yourself on TV.)  The audience, mostly comprised of retired people -- I attended a matinee on a Friday -- laughed heartily at many of the film's gags and seemed to appreciate the movie.  (In the theater where I saw the picture, overly aggressive employees flipped on the lights and began cleaning the auditorium before the end of the credits, pressuring customers to leave the theater -- this was unfortunate because the picture comes equipped with post-credits sequence that I didn't see; there were a number of jokes spliced into the closing credits and people shouldn't be hurried out of the theater with regard to a film of this sort.)  The movie is throw-back to pictures like the original Naked Gun with Leslie Nielsen and the Airport franchise with Robert Stack -- these movies are parodies of genre films (buddy-cop police procedurals and disaster-in-the-air pictures respectively) and they are constructed on the basis of a vestigial plot that is merely a scaffold on which to assemble as many gags as possible -- many of them either sight gags or verbal humor based on puns and misunderstandings.  (In The Naked Gun, Liam Neeson as Detective Frank Drebin Jr. tells Pamela Anderson playing the femme fatale Beth Davenport to "take a chair" meaning "sit down"; instead, she picks up a chair and drags it out of the station house when she leaves in a huff knocking people over, spilling files on the floor, and causing generous amounts of mayhem.)  The movie is self-aware, winking broadly at the audience -- in the final credits scene, Drebin and Davenport discover they are being surveilled by the camera and the hero literally punches his way through the screen,  I would estimate that about 25% of the gags "landed", the rest failing in one way or another -- but a ratio of one good joke to four stinkers is pretty good.  The frame is crowded with all sorts of business with sight-gags layered all the way from foreground to the back of the shot -- the effect is like a Mad Magazine movie parody. The jokes and word-play come so fast that it's hard to keep track of it -- the movie has an antic quality that makes it rather exhausting to watch.  I recall that the greatest silent comedies generally were made as two-reelers which seems to me to be about the length of time that, even, an attentive audience can sustain jokes of this kind.  After awhile, the hilarity runs thin and the scenario keeps repeating the same gags.  One running motif is that disembodied off-screen hands keep reaching into the frame to hand Drebin and his side-kick cups of coffee -- this occurs even when Drebin is driving at high speed or being carried through the air by an owl.  In one sequence, Drebin sees the silhouette of an outrageously voluptuous dame through a semi-opaque window -- when he opens the door, the figure is revealed to be just a collection of hats and gloves and jackets arranged on a coatrack.  In one of the funniest scenes, this gag is repeated:  a crook who is watching Drebin with Beth Davenport (the cop's romantic interest in the movie) sees them performing all sorts of outrageous sex acts including a threesome with a big dog; however, the hood is watching shadows on a curtain and we can see that what is really happening in the room is nothing like it looks on screen.  There are about four or five sex acts deceptively displayed in this way as well as the silhouette of the broad in the early scene -- it's ingenious and funny but the inspiration of the writers seems to be waning a bit.  

The film's premise is that a master-criminal (played by Danny Huston with a scar that keeps migrating from cheek to cheek -- an effect stolen from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein in which Eyegor's hump keeps moving from one shoulder to another) has stolen a sort of TV remote control labeled "P.L.O.T. Device" -- this thing, when activated, causes people to revert to their primitive and savage instincts, stirring up mass chaos and slaughter.  (Comedy has a very conservative vision of human nature).  The device was invented or programmed or something by Beth Davenport's husband who was murdered by manipulation of a self-driving car -- it was piloted off a cliff into a quarry.  Frank Drebin has busted-up the bank robbery in which an army of armed men have stolen the P.L,O,T, device from a safe deposit  box.  Drebin is always in trouble with his feisty Black female boss -- he's a typical "rogue cop", a sort of "Dirty Harry."  She takes him off the investigation of the bank heist and assigns him work on the supposed suicide of the programmer, who was Beth Davenport's  husband.  Beth Davenport is extravagantly sexy and seduces Frank.  (They have a sex scene with an animated snow man -- a sort of Frosty the Snowman menage a trois).  The two investigations collide, coalesce, and the movie turns into a James Bond-style battle between the mad scientist villain and Frank Drebin.  There's some scatological humor involving diarrhea and Drebin's body-cam (that he has been ordered to deploy and keep running) and, at one point, an owl assails a fleeing bad man with owl feces.  There are enough clever bits to keep the audience's attention up to the end of the movie which is about 82 minutes long.  Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr. (Lesley Nielsen was the original Frank Drebin) is very funny in a gruff discombobulated way and he gets one of the best entrances in film history.  Pam Anderson is both sexy and ridiculous.  The part of Drebin's side-kick, Ed Hocken (the son of Ed Hocken, Sr. played in the original film by George Kennedy) is grossly underwritten and the character really has little or nothing to do.  There is a funny O. J. Simpson gag --  the football player was in both the original Naked Gun and the Airport pictures.  Naked Gun (2025) was directed by Akiva Schaffer and it's an amusing diversion.  I recommend it.  

L'Atlantide (1932)

 A man at a podium reads from notes:  people have been looking for Atlantis in the wrong place.  The lost civilization isn't drowned beneath the sea but buried under the sands of the Sahara.  This declaration is broadcast over the radio.  Two men in the French Foreign Legion are listening to the radio on the parapets of a desert fort.  One of the men, named Saint Avit says that "it's all true."  His interlocutor asks if he referring to the Morehange affair.  Saint Avit says that Morehange is not missing but that he killed him.  A subaltern brings a lantern and set it on the dried mud embrasure.  Saint Avit says that he will explain this murder. The sun sets over the desert.  Someone says that a storm is brewing.

In the bright dawn two years earlier, Saint Avit and Morehange set forth on camels.  They join a caravan bearing salt to Timbuktu. The procession of camels comes upon a skeleton buried in the drifting sands.  An attractive woman is now on camel herself riding between Saint Avit and Morehange.  When the caravan camps, she uses a typewriter to write some kind of communique -- she is a journalist.  The next morning, Saint Avit and Morehange depart again with four or five Tuaregs.  They are on a secret mission to find traces of Atlantis buried under the sands.  The female journalist cries "Au Revoir" as they set forth. Later, the two men come upon another Tuareg, his face covered in a black burnoose, alone and inexplicably dying in the empty desert.  The party enters a rocky defile where one of their men, separated from the group, is found dead.  It's cold at night and the men sit around a campfire; the masked and hooded Tuareg tribesmen are like enigmatic statues in the flickering firelight, silent and motionless.  There's an alarum in the night.  Morehange is missing.  Some sort of attack occurs and Saint Avit is seized.  There's a cut away from the fracas in the night to a shot of Saint Avit sprawled over the back of a camel in the bright sun; his eyes are open and he seems dead.  There's another cut to black and, then, we see a ruinous village, broken arches and mud brick houses with narrow tilted alleyways.  A blind man is singing monotonously to a group of hooded figures while a beautiful woman with huge hoop earrings looks on.  There's a burst of music:  a group of villagers is listening to Offenbach's "Can-Can" from Orpheus in the Underworld -- they have a large, old-style gramophone.  Muslim men are prostrate praying in a courtyard and Saint Avit faints.  In the next shot, we see him being carried down a long flight of worn stone steps.  Saint Avit comes to in a grotto where a large basin seems to be pebbled with gold nuggets.  Barber tools are on a tray.  A woman has shaved him and cut his hair while he was unconscious and he is now wearing a slender black tie, white shirt, and a white jacket.  A little man with a waxed upturned moustache appears -- he looks like a jolly boulevardier and wears a sort of tuxedo with a huge white rose in its lapel.  There is a burst of Offenbach's Can-Can on the soundtrack and, then, the merry little fellow (his name is Hetland) starts mixing cocktails in a silver shaker.  A disheveled man named Tolstetson stumbles into the arched crypt-like chamber.  He seems deranged and keeps muttering the name "Antinea".  Soon, Hetland, the boulevardier, says they will give us "Kuff", a compound that is 40% hashish and 60% opium.  Hetland tells Saint Avit that he has been here 20 years but still doesn't know where he is.  He says that Antinea is a woman and a goddess and that, as far as he is concerned,all women are goddesses.  Tolstenton has a nasty scar over his right eye, a big cup-shaped dent in his face.  A leopard sometimes slinks through the archways in the underground  labyrinth.  A hooded servant enters and says that "she has called for you".  Saint Avit goes with the man down a buried corridor.  Tolstenson lunges out of a niche in the wall and tries to strangle Saint Avit.  His guide, like a sleepwalker, just continues walking down the tunnel.  Saint Avit overcomes the deranged man.  Tolstetson breaks a bottle and uses the shattered glass to slit his wrist.   

In a richly appointed chamber, a woman with the features of a Greek sculpture, Aphrodite or Athena, is playing chess with the beautiful dark-skinned girl with the big hoop earrings.  There are other girls playing stringed instruments.  The woman, Antinea, plays chess with Saint Avit -- she puts him in check eight or nine times as his king flees across the chess board, but, then, it is checkmate.  Antinea adjourns to a chamber dominated by a huge sculpted head -- the size of the front of a bus, the sculpture is an idealized portrait of Antinea.  There is then a disorienting cut to a cabaret in Paris where a dozen women are dancing the can-can.  Hetland is watching them.  He goes to a dressing room where he caresses one of the dancers, a plump girl named Clementine.  Just as he is about to enjoy her, a Berber enters the room and claims Clementine for himself.  The flashback ends and we see Antinea gazing at herself in a mirror and caressing her own body.  The leopard on a leash is leading Saint Avit through the underground hallways and arcades to a place where he can see Antinea with Morehange.  Antinea says that she loves Morehange.  Saint Avit, who has been smoking "Kuff", is jealous.  The dark-eyed girl with the big earrings watches as Saint Avit embraces Antinea.  He falls to his knees and buries his head between her thighs.  She orders him to kill Morehange.  No sooner commanded, then, done.  Saint Avit batters Morehange to death with what looks like croquet mallet.  Antinea stands brooding next to the colossal head and Saint Avit, appalled by his act, charges her with the mallet.  He's swarmed by hooded, masked figures..The girl with the earrings spirits him away and, on a single camel, they escape across the desert.  But soon enough they have exhausted their water.  They stumble through the wasteland to a well, but, upon removing the capstone, they find the pit empty except for a corpse in the shaft.  The woman with the big earrings dies.  Saint Avit buries her and, then, staggers into a mirage of waves beating against a shore.  He collapses but a small plane appears and the shadow of aircraft passes over his body.   We see an electric fan -- the fan's rotors rhyme with the planes prop.  

It's now dawn on the parapet of the fort.  Saint Avit and the other man have talked all night.  A black masked man appears and seems to lead Saint Avit away.  The commander at the fort sends a party after him, tracking his movement across the desert by camel hoofprints in the sand.  But the big storm promised earlier occurs and the trail is lost in the blinding sandstorm.  

The whole thing is like a fever dream.  I had to watch the movie twice to verify that what I thought I saw was actually on-screen.  The movie is shot in the style of silent films, with luminous close-ups and monumental sets.  The desert scenes are filmed documentary style and, so, the picture is a weird combination of exquisite hallucination and bluntly realistic footage.  The movie's pace is oddly languorous, stunned it seems.  Much of the desert scenes features tiny ant-like figures moving in the huge, stony wilderness.  All transitions are elided -- it's never clear how characters move from one place to another.  Most of the narrative is concealed, hidden behind the veils of mask, burnoose, and blowing sand.  A paradigm sequence involves the well that Saint Avit and the desert girl come upon near the end of the movie.  The well is covered by a flat slab of rock that they can move only with the most arduous effort -- there is something dreamlike about their prolonged and desperate struggle with rock covering the well, itself just a tiny spider-hole in the endless desert.  As they push the stone aside, the camera tilts up to show their faces looking down into the pit --the man and woman are shot in a way that makes them seem enormously glamorous, hyper-sexual, even, though, supposedly they are dying -- their eyes leak light. Behind their faces, however, we see sinister cascades of sand falling into the hole.  Then, we are shown their point of view -- the pit is a dark shaft with the figure of hooded corpse lying below them, most sand falling in trickles down the side of the pit.  

The DVD is strange, a curious artifact with next to no information written on the box.  The cover shows Antinea in a black peplos glaring at the camera next to the colossal classically sculpted head.  The DVD box says that the picture comes from Long Island City.  It's a Mr. Fat W Video.  There's no menu and the DVD, once activated, just begins playing with the movie's titles.  But there is a 5 second prelude, an odd figure shaped like a plucked chicken with eyes on its breast -- this is apparently Mr. Fat.  He raises his drumstick arms and jumps up and down.  

L'Atlantide is a film directed in 1932 by G. W. Pabst, apparently shot in three versions:  German, French, and English.  (The DVD presents the French version).  Antinea is played by Brigitta Helm, the actress who played the dual role of the humble, Christ-like Maria and the lewd, destructive robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.  (She also plays the abused blind girl in Pabst's 1927 The Love of Jeanne Ney). She presents an alarming somnambulant spectacle in the film, an embodiment of detached, abstract eros.  The beautiful dark-skinned girl with the big earrings (in profile she looks Navajo) is someone named Telo Tchai.  The film is far weirder than I am able to describe.  Some of the sequences seem quasi-experimental and the gramophone playing Offenbach to the hooded Berbers is a surrealist image worthy of something from Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana, his peculiar picture about, among other things, desert mirages in the Sahara.  Apparently, the film adapts a novel by Pierre Benoit, popular enough to have spawned several film versions -- I count, at least, five iterations including a notable 3 1/2 hour version by Jacques Feyder made in 1921, a Hollywood version with Maria Montez from 1948, and made-for-Tv movie in 1992.  Pabst's picture has been hard to see and is not well-regarded critically, although I wonder how many people have actually watched this movie.  In fact, it's very good and stands for the proposition that Pabst is always a more interesting director than he is given credit for.  

(Research shows me that Brigitte Helm plays three parts in the movie -- the lady journalist (who seems to be writing the script for the film), Clementine, and Antinea.  Some reviews says that Clementine and Antinea are the same character -- that the Queen was originally a dancer in French cabaret.  Tela Tchai aka Marth Noemi Winterstein was a Romi actress, a model for people like Picasso, and, later, a painter in her own right.)

Architecton

 Pythagoras said:  "A stone is frozen music."  In Architectron (2024), a grave and austere film symphony, stone is only rarely frozen -- rather, it flows and surges with oceanic impulses.  We see enormous landslides shot in close-up as a Brownian motion of agitated rock ovals and cubes carried in a slurry of muddy earth.  Explosions dislodge whole hillsides that come toppling down.  Gravel lunges and surges on conveyor belts and ore is melted into fiery red magma.  Heaps of stone stir and leap with mysterious animate energy.  And, everywhere, the film documents the ephemeral aspect of stone used in human buildings -- we see the Brutalist shells of vast, enigmatic structures, ripped asunder, rectangular windows in their domes casting white squares of light into the concrete rubble fallen from walls and roofs.  Apartment blocks in Ukraine are ripped open, exposing rooms like niches filled with decaying relics.  A drone lazes through a vast gap in a wall of highrises where an enormous billboard announces that the UN has denounced the fighting in Ukraine. In the distance, we seen gilded onion-domes of churches, some of them possibly damaged.  Miles and miles of residential highrises have been ripped open and are spilling their contents into lanes full of mountainous piles of debris -- this seems to be the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey.  Some disheveled palms stand along the desolate boulevards where big, insectoid loaders and excavators are disemboweling the concrete escarpments.  On hill tops. vast drum-like pillars, all dissected into sections lie strewn in grassy meadows or are piled together like colossal, sinister gears.  On a mountain, ruins stretch out to the horizon, marked here and there by squashed brick arches -- it's like the end of an empire imagined by Thomas Cole.  

Ostensibly, the Kossokovsky's documentary seems to have something to do with the most mundane of all subjects:  concrete and building materials made from stone.  The film has a complex and pulsing orchestral score -- it's like Stravinsky's ballet music with a throbbing New Age impetus.  But there are almost no words and human beings either are absent from most shots or dwarfed by massive cubist ranges of stone and concrete.  (The mighty avalanches and landslides that punctuate the film would be lethal to mere flesh.)  The movie begins with a prologue showing the destruction of residential condominiums in Ukraine.  The film's long middle section commences with an old man with a rabbinical beard scrambling around a vast quarry full of pinkish monoliths, one of which is the size of several locomotives.  (This turns out to be the quarry at Baalbek -- although the place is never identified in the film -- the site of a vast block that was cut for some Roman or Egyptian building project but never hauled from its native quarry.)  In this quarry, incongruously, we hear faint city noises, traffic honking, and the like -- toward the end of the movie, a  reverse shot shows that this jumble of huge stones and debris occupies a crater right next to a busy street and some raw-looking edifices where people live.  The building blocks from which the movie is made and to which the picture reverts at intervals are a vast quarry, hollowed into the side of a mountain, dozens and dozens of terraces stacked atop one another like a ladder tilted against the peak, Greek and Roman ruins, a mountaintop covered in labyrinthine cells and chambers, all roofless, interspersed with brick arches, a machine pouring concrete like white frosting on a cake, the old man with the rabbinical beard constructing a circle of stones inset into his lawn (he and his two workers select the stones and stack them in a groove cut into the sod), a man who perches stones on top of one another in impossible seeming stacks, each rock precisely balanced on the rock below it, mighty explosions and landslides, tidal waves of rock rolling and falling and careening down hillsides, the ruins of modern residential high rises wrecked by war or earthquake, enormous earthmoving machines rooting around in piles of rubble, loading huge trucks that, then, travel in convoy to a canyon on the edge of the hollowed-out quarry mountain -- the robotic-looking machines dump the rubble into the canyon from which plumes and towering blossoms of dust rise.  The film's rhythm is that of landslide, repose, landslide, repose -- that is, alternating sequences of destruction and construction.  The old man completes his stone circle in a snowstorm.  He hopes that his horses and his dog will enter the circle when it is complete.  An aerial shot near the the end of the movie shows the architect's black labrador hunkered down at the center of the circle in the falling rain.  I saw this movie on a big screen -- it is mindlessly, colossally spectacular; the picture is 85 minutes long and, also, extremely tedious.  After the fourth or fifth, landslide or quarry explosion, you begin to wonder:  what's the point of this?  In the Russian manner, Kossokovsky spiritualizes brute matter -- he makes concrete and raw stone into soul-stuff.  Everything that seems solid, also flows, metamorphoses:  What we have stacked-up, inevitably, falls to the earth.

At the end of the movie, in an epilogue, we see Kossokovsky talking to the old man, apparently, a celebrated Italian architect.  The old man is seated by his stone circle.  The grass and weeds in the circle are tall but two robot-mowers are tirelessly grazing on the lawn around the circle -- a strange effect.  From this angle, we can see that the architect's elegant baroque villa is on a hillside near a teeming city.  The architect asks rhetorically why everything that we build is so ugly.  He admits he has just erected a bland, utilitarian skyscraper in Milan that is hideous and says, almost in tears, that he is ashamed of himself.  The old man claims that the epidemic of ugliness in architecture is due to the ubiquity of concrete, a building substance that he denounces.  But this epilogue falsifies the imagery of the movie.  The circle seems to clearly embody the rhythm of destruction and creation that characterize the film -- everything in the end becomes ruin, mere insensate stone. The concrete shown in the movie is just as spectacular as the heaps of hewn and carved stones at the ancient sites.  How is the concrete inferior to the massive cut obelisk sprawled on the living stone in the Baalbek quarry?  And all of the classical-era buildings are fallen, lying in graceful heaps of rounded pillars in the golden-rod.  Concrete is just as susceptible to earthquake and war as stone.  Earthquake and war reduce both stone and concrete to dust and debris.  In fact, Kossokovsky's final image shows some kind of colossal concrete maze -- the scenes provide no sense of scale:  mighty grooves make canyons between buttes of white concrete -- this cement landscape is on the scale of the other great vistas in the movie:  we see foggy mountains, hillsides that are three-thousand feet high hacked into stacked terraces, a coal train crossing an ocean it seems on a diaphanous skein of track in the middle of the waters -- both stone and concrete are subject to the pulse of violent destruction and creation.  

Of course, the viewer's impulse is to research the movie to try to figure out the location of the incredibly spectacular landscapes.  This sort of research seemingly defeats the purpose because if the director wanted you to identify these glacial, spiritual landscapes with real places, he would have provided this information.  Everything presented in the movie is an appearance that seems unreal, ghostly, a fantasy of stacked stone falling apart and concrete rupturing into black fissures.  The old man has a discussion with a quarry worker at Baalbek -- the worker, also an old man, has spent his life "cleaning" the quarry.  It's a Sisyphean endless task and we see the man pitching rocks into a wheelbarrow and, then, laboriously pushing the wheelbarrow up steep faces of stone.  (What is he doing?)  It's irritating that the filmmaker so steadfastly refuses to provide any information about what we are seeing.  From the director's perspective, the spectacle is Platonic -- an incursion into an ideal world of forms embodying creation and destruction, the pulse of spirit embodied in matter.

You have to be in a certain mood to tolerate a film like this.  Probably, for most people, watching the film's spectacular trailer would be sufficient.

(The concrete labyrinth at the end of the film is an installation art work in Sicily called Grande Creta -- the "great crack".  The work is by Alberto Burri and located on the site of a hilltown called Gibellina that was destroyed in an earthquake.  Burri's work mimics the streets and alleys of the lost town and was made between 1984 and 2015.  Some critics regard Achitecton as part of a triptych comprised by Kossovosky's earlier Aquarela (about water) and Gunda (about pigs).  The mountain sculpted into innumerable terraces is in Austria; Baalbek is in Lebanon.)