Arabian Nights

Arabian Nights is a three-part film directed by the Portuguese auteur, Miguel Gomes.  The work is comprised of three movies, each longer than two hours -- the complete film screens at about 6 1/2 hours.  Gomes' ambition is to show the effects of the great recession as experienced in Portugal -- in effect, the movie is about economic hardship.  That said, Gomes is a witty director and the films are full of surreal touches that lighten the mood.  Furthermore, poverty in Portugal is so picturesque that it is hard sometimes to remain in the dour mood that most of the content requires. 

The first film is entitled The Restless One.  The first twenty minutes introduces the plight of the director faced with this unprepossessing material.  Gomes mopes around a sidewalk café, a sullen-looking slacker similar to the figure that he portrayed, another ne-er-do-well director, in his 2008 Our Beloved Month of August.  Gomes is trying to make a picture about the recession comprised of interviews with laid-off dockworkers intercut with a documentary about a beekeeper hoping to exterminate an invasive species of hornets that are ravaging the local bee population.  Gomes suspects a metaphoric connection between the topics but can't quite figure out what it would be -- in fact, the problem is that the invasive hornet subject has an unpleasantly xenophobic edge that Gomes, I think, can't quite assimilate:  are the hornets workers from third-world countries stealing jobs from the Portuguese or (more disturbing) are the hornets to be equated to Portuguese expatriates working in places like Germany, driven from their homes by the economic downturn.  Gomes can't make sense of the footage that he has exposed:  images of men with torches setting hornet nests on fire and disconsolate shipyard workers standing among empty docks.  So, he tries to literally run away -- we see him walk away from the café and, then, flee at top speed down the street.  Gomes is captured, buried to the neck, in sand and forced to repent his responsibility.  Thus, twenty-five minutes into the film, the title is projected Arabian Nights and the nature of the project announced:  Gomes will make a number of short films, stories after the manner of the tales told Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights.  The project is introduced with some frippery about the Virgins of Baghdad and images of a morose-looking camel.  Then, the first story is narrated:  The Story of the Men with Hard-Ons.  This tale is weak, something about finance ministers who are afflicted with priapism by beturbaned Moor -- it isn't funny or sexually explicit and I couldn't figure out what Gomes meant with the tale.  A little better is the second story:  a tale of love and jealousy set in the picturesque mountains featured in Our Beloved Month of August -- the segment is called The Story of the Cockerel and involves a rooster that crows too early in the morning and is condemned by neighbors for waking everyone up too soon.  This sequence involves some magical realism -- a local Judge in his robes interrogates the cockerel and the beast responds that his crows are a warning cry intended to alert all men to an imminent calamity.  The three lovers are firefighters of the kind that are shown in Our Beloved Month of August -- they patrol the mountains in their brilliantly scarlet engine, the equivalent, it seems, of the rooster, fighting fires that one of the lovers has set out of jealousy at the affair between the other two.  (The lovers are played by pre-pubescent girls who communicate in telegraphic text-messages, another whimsical invention by Gomes that goes nowhere and, even, seems a little creepy.)  The final episode in the film involves a story enclosing three tales nested inside -- a civic booster and swimming coach in a seaside village promotes an annual event called "The Swim of the Magnificents".   This is a kind of "polar bear" plunge of the sort known in many Northern countries -- local people plunge into icy water on January 1, generally as a fundraiser for a charity.  The swimming coach has a bad heart and the opening scene is set in the belly of a whale where a white-coated doctor is supervising an angiogram on the man.  Later, we see the whale from the outside, a disconsolate and battered hulk on the grey beach -- it explodes when people try to approach it, leaving hunks of bloody blubber everywhere as well as a forlorn-looking disgorged mermaid.  The tales nested within the story involve lengthy narrative "talking head" accounts, of how the economic recession has blasted the lives of three of the "magnificents" participating in the plunge.  Most of the surreal aspects of the film, at least in the first part, feel staged and arbitrary and the acting, such as it is, has an amateurish quality -- the documentary elements of the film are more impressive, but they don't really match the Byzantine narratives in which they are embedded.

Each film in the trilogy begins with this title:  "The country was held hostage by a program of austerity by a government apparently devoid of social justice."  The title is necessary because the movies don't exactly illustrate this premise -- Gomes is cunning enough to know that anything that he shows will assume significance in light of his premise; in effect, the meanings of some of the episodes seem to be "accidental" -- scenes can be read as metaphoric of the economic situation but this is not intrinsic, or, even, necessary to what we see.  An example occurs in the second film, The Desolate One.  Between two episodes we are shown an interlude involving girl scouts at some kind of Baroque-era fortification.  The girls, enrolled in some self-confidence building "Outward Bound" program, are encouraged to descend a flimsy-looking rope bridge with the assurance that they are harnessed to the bridge and can not be injured.  Of course, one of the girls slips, the harness fails, and she drops out of sight -- probably, the best metaphor for how Gomes sees Portugal's economic safety net, but, of course, an accidental "objective correlative" and one that passes so quickly that we don't have time to think about it until the film has ended.  Three complicated stories occupy "The Desolate One".  The first involves a bandit named Sirmao "withot bowels" (sin tripas).  The section consists of beautiful landscapes that look like New Mexico with a scowling, bad hombre marching around in the wilderness.  There is no story and the tale ends pointlessly with the bad guy captured by authorities while eating beans for supper; the local populace comes out and cheers for him although Sirmao has killed several women.  (This section is plagued by a surrealist interlude in which three beautiful women go to Sirmao's ruinous lair and have sex with him while engaging in all girl version of Guy Maddin's indelible "Sissy Boy Slap" party -- I have no idea what this is supposed to mean and it seems to be nothing but self-indulgence on the part of the director.)  The second story takes place at night in an amphitheater where a judge is conducting a nightmare trial -- some of the defendants are a genie, five men in African masks who have committed various crimes of theft, a milk cow, 13 Chinese concubines, and an ancient olive tree.  The point of the story is that everyone is implicated in an elaborate web of theft and exploitation -- the trial has begun as a simple case of criminal conversion, a tenant hocking furniture in a furnished apartment to make ends meet, but ends with a cosmic indictment of mutual complicity and criminality that leaves the judge in tears.  Gomes hits his stride with the third story, an undeniably powerful neo-realist portrait of the inhabitants of an apartment block -- apparently, the same apartment building featured in the first section of Tabu.  A fluffy white dog appears, seemingly the reincarnation of a dog that one of the tenants previously owned.  The appealing little dog, Dixie, is described by Scheherazad as a "love machine and a forgetting machine."  The dog passes from owner to owner.  A man and woman who harbor the dog commit suicide after delivering the dog to a junkie and his girlfriend.  The junkie and his girlfriend bring the dog to the building's concierge, the spooky woman from Cape Verde accused of being a witch in Tabu.  Apparently, her friend was the owner of the original Dixie and, in the film's final scene, we see the little dog playing with the ghost of the earlier dog.  This would be purely whimsical except for the fact that when the current Dixie runs off-screen, the ghost dog rolls over onto her side, twitches a little, and seems to die.  This sequence is enlivened with a series of tiny vignettes about the inhabitants of the apartment block, sequences that are strangely moving and enigmatic -- something like the mysterious vignettes comprising Georges Perec's great jigsaw novel Life a User's Manual or a bit like the angelic-tour of Berlin in the first fifteen minutes of Wings of Desire.  This sequence is genuinely moving and, even, its surrealist images -- for instance, torrents of urine running down an elevator shaft -- contribute to the power of this sequence.  Gomes is an inveterate narrator -- he slips tiny narratives into the film's integument.  For instance, one sequence begins with a close-up of a bloody penis -- the man has just deflowered the Judge's daughter.  The girl calls the Judge, her mother, and says that she wants to make a cake for her boyfriend.  The Judge explains how to make the cake before taking the bench in the nightmare trial and warns:  "you could have the Black maid make the cake, but this will lead your man to think that he can get what he needs from her."  A half-hour later, we see a half-naked and voluptuous Black woman cooking a cake in a dark kitchen. 

The third film in the trilogy, The Enchanted One, reverts to the diffuse documentary style of the first installment.  The opening titles remind us that the film is about Portugal's economic malaise but Gomes seems to have, more or less, abandoned any pretense toward developing that subject.  Hermeneutic contortions are required to find any connection to that theme in much of the rest of the film -- by the third movie, there seems to me to be no connection at all, or, perhaps, a perverse negative relationship:  perhaps, the third film shows how people avoid considering the recession by devoting themselves to other pursuits:  the great economic recession seems present in the third film by its very absence.  In L'Age d'Or, Bunuel began his surrealist film with a short, and objective, documentary about the habits of scorpions -- this sequence immediately collided with a religious procession on a rocky shore, lovers grappling in the muck, and some fossilized religious figures.  Gomes follows this procedure at much greater length -- most of the third film is devoted to an objective cinema verite documentary abut raising chaffinches and a competition staged between the singing birds.  For about 90 minutes, Gomes introduces us to various unemployed men who trap the wild birds (illegally) and, then, raise them for the competitions.  This vocation seems always to have been a product of the slums.  Gomes shows us vintage footage of crumbling neighborhoods since replaced by high-rise projects where the chaffinch devotees were raised -- these neighborhoods are adjacent to the airport and, so, in many of the shots we see planes landing and taking off.  One of the chaffinch hobbyists is Vargas, the junkie from the Dixie episode in the previous film and, I believe, it is his bird that dies in the competition.  Truth to tell, Gomes isn't very accomplished as a documentary film maker, or better put, is unconcerned about ordinary narrative -- he doesn't gin up any suspense about the competition, never really establishes its rules, and, for most of the documentary, we can't tell exactly what is happening:  groups of hoodlums stand around small cages covered in white muslin and, unseen, the birds sing -- the competition doesn't have any visual flair:  it seems to be conducted in a vacant lot under some jerry-rigged plastic awning.  One of the birds, perhaps, sings itself to death -- but this isn't clearly depicted.  We learn a few things about finch songs, a couple tricks about catching them, and, then, the documentary simply stops, more or less arbitrarily.  (It doesn't help that Gomes interrupts the documentary with footage of a police strike overlaid with a story narrated by Chinese girl:  she fell in love with a Lisbon cop, he deflowered her -- one of Gomes' favorite motifs -- and, after an abortion, and the collapse of the love affair and, then, a fatal fire,the girl is deported to Beijing.)  A man is caught in the netting used to catch chaffinches -- he turns out to be a genie.  When the chaffinch trapper releases him, he offers the man 10 euros.  The trapper says he needs 10 million euros.  The genie doesn't have that kind of money and so the trapper refuses any pay at all.  Disgruntled, the bird-catcher wanders through the Portuguese landscape; he seems to be the same chap who played Sirmao, without bowels, a figure of the indomitable Portuguese bandit living off the land.  The proceedings are enlivened by various renditions of the song Perfidia (performed by Glenn Miller and Nat King Cole among others) and there is a lengthy whimsical preface involving Scheherazad dallying with a golden boy among the rocky cliffs of a Mediterranean shore -- just as Shakespeare imagined the seacoast of Bohemia, Gomes imagines Baghdad to be a white city on the shore of a gorgeous semi-tropical ocean.  A deep melancholy afflicts the storyteller -- we see her confiding to her father, the Grand Vizier, that she will be out of stories soon and that the King will return to his murderous ways.  There is some dancing and singing, including an utterly bizarre sound cue, a country-western tune called "Son of a Gun" by Lee Hazelwood.  The style in this introductory section is that of Godardian overload -- we get too much information too quickly, titles, voice-overs, songs, in some instances, multiple exposures some of them extremely eloquent, but it all adds up to nothing.   There are hints of other stories that are not developed, something about a great diver and a sunken treasure, and a longing for Bahia, an element of Portuguese nostalgia for its lost empire, but, despite some exquisite imagery, almost too pretty in fact, I couldn't patch this collage together to make much sense of it.  (There is a good gag -- after imprisoning the genie of the wind, Scheherazad pitches her magic lamp into the sea; this upsets a bunch of beach boys diving from the rocks:  "Hey lady! they cry, you can't use the sea as your trash can.)

Ultimately, Arabian Nights seems to me to be a grandiose failure.  The film doesn't cohere and its various parts can't be made to signify anything.  It's a miscellany or grab bag, something conceded in a final title -- Gomes dedicates the film to his eight-year old daughter in the hope that she will extract from it something that she likes.  This is an uncharitable surmise, but all the sound and fury (Gomes production company is called O Som e a Furia) about Portugal's economic recession seems to be nothing but protective coloration, an attempt to impart significance to the film that it doesn't otherwise possess.  Despite some noteworthy sequences, particularly those in the second part of the trilogy, the film is not the masterpiece that critics, eager to support Gomes, have claimed.    

Film essay -- Kazuo Hara's Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974

Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974



　

　
Kazuo Hara is a Japanese documentary film maker. (He has made one narrative feature film about which I know nothing.)

Kazuo Hara was born in 1945 in Yamaguchi Prefecture. He never saw his father.

Kazuo Hara attended the Tokyo Technical School of Photography. After that vocational training, Kazuo Hara worked as an assistant cameraman on some films directed by Shohei Imamura.

Kazuo Hara did not attend film school. Kazuo Hara did not attend college. There were violent college protests about the Vietnam war. Kazuo Hara watched those from the side-lines and did not take part.

With his girlfriend, Sachiko Kobayashi, Kazuo Hara founded Shisso Productions in 1971.

In 1972, Kazuo Hara produced Sayonara CP. The film is a documentary about a group of severely disabled men with cerebral palsy.

In 1974, Kazuo Hara produced Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974, a documentary about a triangle between Kazuo Hara, Miyuki Takeda, a Japanese feminist and sex-worker, and Hara’s girlfriend (and production partner at Shissho), Sachiko Kobayashi.

Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974 was so excessive that Hara was unable to raise money to complete any productions for a decade.

Kazuo Hara produced The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on in 1987. This documentary about a crazed World War II veteran investigating war crimes committed in New Guinea in Kazuo Hara’s most well-known film. It is also exceptionally controversial and has never been shown on Japanese TV.

Kazuo Hara produced A Dedicated Life in 1995. A Dedicated Life is a documentary about a radical left wing writer Mitsuharu Inoue.

Kazuo Hara has made two other films since that time, one of them a narrative dramatic picture, but I can not find any information about those movies.

　

B.

Kazuo Hara calls the films that he makes "action documentaries."

He says:

Life is acting. There are two sides to people. The person one wants to be and the person one is. I want the people in my movies to act the way they want to be. ...Movies must have good and evil, bad men and heroes. It is like Batman and Superman. It is the same (in my documentaries). ... I Like to make dramatic movies. I fell strongly about this, more than other directors. I love Hollywood action films, and I wanted Okuzaki (the protagonist in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on) to act like an action star. I want to make action documentary films...

In each of his documentary films, there is are "action" sequences, scenes in which the protagonists engage in behavior that is objectively dangerous. In Sayonara CP, the extremely handicapped hero moves around Tokyo on his knees, walking through heavy traffic and climbing on and off subways, in a way that the man’s wife (also disabled by cerebral palsy) finds dangerous and degrading. She demands that her husband use a wheelchair. He refuses and there is a savage quarrel resulting in the two disabled people physically exchanging blows while the woman shrieks to Hara to stop filming – he refuses.

In The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, the protagonist has served time for both murder and for using a slingshot to fling pachinko balls at the Emperor. He gains access to the homes of elderly world war veterans and demands that they answer his questions about atrocities committed in New Guinea. When the old men refuse to answer his questions, the protagonists attacks them and literally beats the truth of his witnesses – in some cases, also beating the wives of his unfortunate interview subjects who intervene to protect their elderly husbands. Outraged that some of the old men obstinately refuse to admit that they are war criminals, the film’s protagonist offers to commit a murder while Hara is filming. Hara declines the proposal but, only, because, as he says, "I was really sick of Okuzaki and was tired of him."

In A Dedicated Life, Hara begins the film by prying into the sexual life of his subject, the radical Leftist writer, Inoue. Hara hunts down women with whom Inoue had affairs while he was married and interviews them. Then, Inoue develops liver cancer. Hara films his surgery in graphic detail. Inoue’s cancer has metastasized and Hara laters films his decline and death.

In Extreme Private Eros 1974 Love Song, Hara’s ex-girlfriend, pregnant with a half-Black child, decides to demonstrate her feminist principles by having the baby in her apartment without any medical personnel present. Hara films the ordeal.

　

C.

My second film, Extreme Private Eros 1974, was all about my "privacy." It was about a triangle between myself, my former wife, and my present wife. You know, I make documentaries, and as for reality and fiction, well, we call them documentaries, but they are really made up...From my viewpoint, a documentary should explore things that people don’t want explored, bring things out of the closet, to examine why people want to hide certain things. When people are talking about themselves, they put limits and taboos on what they are willing to talk about, their privacy...

The sound is not synchronized with the image in Extreme Private Eros 1974. Hara says: I was very poor at the time. I could not afford a camera that would do the sound with the pictures...

On the subject of the film, Hara says:


In the sixties and seventies, there as feeling that if the individual did not cause change, nothing would change. At the time, I wanted to make a movie, and I was wondering how I could make a statement for change. At the time, there was much talk of familial imperialism ("kazoku teikokishugi"). One of the strong sentiments of the time was that familial imperialism should be destroyed. I thought that if I could put my own family under the camera, all our emotions, our proviacy, I wondered if I might break taboos about the family...
Interviewer: You were called a masochist about you made Extreme Private Eros Love Song 1974.

Hara: When the subject of my film is perceived to be stronger than I, as Miyuki Takeda (the main character in the film) was, I was called a masochist: when the subject was perceived to be weaker, I was called a sadist. Instead of being a masochist or sadist, I would say that the nature of documentary filmmaking is that the director puts himself in various situations.

Interviewer: How was the movie received?

Hara: Very well. One funny thing was that the birthing scene, well it seemed to be the women who felt uneasy about the scene, they sometimes got up and left. The men, however, had no chance at that time to see a baby born, so they came to see the film, and watched the birthing scene spellbound...


　
D.

In Europe, particularly England, we date the punk movement from 1972 to about 1976. Greil Marcus in books like Lipstick Traces relates punk esthetics of the Situationist movement. Although it is probable, that Kazuo Hara never heard of the Situationists, I think his Extreme Private Eros can be productively considered as a punk documentary, punk film making ultimately, if remotely, influenced by European situationism. Certainly, the ravaged quality of the soundtrack and images, the intentional display of squalor, and the outrageousness of the emotions on display all accumulate to an experience that is not unlike listening to the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK. Accordingly, I think it helpful to import some ideas about Situationist esthetics into analysis of Hara’s film making.

The International Situationists were radical thinkers comprised of Marxist and post-Marxist activists, initially philosophers a generation younger that the Existentialists and on the fringes of that movement. Their influence is important, particularly in Paris, where Situationist ideas led in part to the failed revolution in May 1968 – disgust and nihilism arising from the collapse of the Paris uprising sent shock waves throughout European capitols and created the environment from which the Punks arose. The Situationists became international in 1957 when the London Psychogeographical Society (a proto-punk movement) combined with the Parisian Lettrists, an offshoot of the doctrinaire Communist party. The leader of the situationists was Guy Debord. His most famous book is The Society of the Spectacle published in 1967 – this book is an underground classic and has been immensely, if covertly, influential: it was a kind of Bible for the punk movement and remains important in various countercultural contexts to this day. (Debord committed suicide in 1994).

Debord argued that Capitalist society is divided into two phases: production and spectacle. People either work to produce capital or they create spectacles intended to endorse the ruling capitalist paradigm. When workers are not working to produce wealth for the bosses, they are narcotized by spectacles designed to keep them from understanding the economic system in which they labor. Debord thought that production of spectacles was equally important to actual economic production in late Capitalist societies because it was only by "spectacle" that the bosses ruled. Debord declared that "all that was once directly lived has become mere representation...images supplant human relationships." In "spectacle," we live by proxy, remotely, through surrogates on TV or the big screen. "Spectacle" is the principle means of social control by which the masses are held in check.

Debord thought that spectacle could be overcome by artists creating counter-spectacles that he called detournement – this was appropriating the spectacle and its seductive imagery to a purpose counter to that for which the spectacle had been engineered. The spectacle engineered to suppress subversive ideas can be "turned topsy-turvy" or upside-down by detournement to yield meanings opposing those espoused by the State. (Debord demonstrated how this might be done by making a film called Society of Spectacle in 1973 using Hollywood film-clips re-cut to yield subversive or counter-cultural meanings.) Counter-spectacles, called "constructed situations", could be staged to subvert ideology advanced by the societally sanctioned "spectacles."

Several elements relating to this praxis can be observed in Hara’s films: first, the director constructs situations that are volatile and that yield violent confrontations from opposing perspectives – these are counter-spectacles "concretely and deliberately"organized to undercut the dominant ideology. In Japan, people who are crippled are deemed esthetically problematic – they are made to disappear. Hara subverts this dominant ideology in　Sayonara CP by having his hero strip naked and squat in the middle of a public square so that the camera can record his deformities and, further, show the reaction of outraged citizens. In Extreme Private Eros, the heroine publicly opposes Japanese ideology relating to the role of women in that society – she seems to think that conceiving a half-Black child is a kind of political gesture that will force a confrontation with the dominant culture. The heroine’s appearance and bisexuality is in stark contrast to Kobayashi, a woman who seems conventionally Japanese in her subordination to the film maker Hara. Furthermore, the entire film project is Debordian spectacle – the film maker Hara prosecutes his intimate relationship with Miyuki by means of a spectacle – he films a relationship that should otherwise be enacted, demonstrating that his relationship with Miyuki is mediated by his camera and sound-systems: the film presents a classic example of an interpersonal relationship colonized, as it were, by media and turned into a spectacle – although, certainly, a counter-spectacle. (Thus, this despairing propositions: all is spectacle – there is no outside to spectacle. Our relationship to reality is now either inevitably through the spectacles staged by the dominant capitalist culture or through a counter-spectacles: fundamentally, we have no authentic relationship with the real.) Psychogeographical concerns are, also, central to Hara’s practice in Extreme Private Eros – the film maker insists upon distinctions between Tokyo and Okinawa. The people on Okinawa have a different geography and, therefore, psyches that differ from the people in Tokyo. To an ideology privileging the relationship of the serene, long-suffering Japanese mother to her children, Hara opposes images of Miyuki Takeda giving birth in a brightly lit room with her first son (Hara’s boy) squatting near her thighs and howling in terror at the spectacle. Hara doesn’t eschew the idea of the spectacle – it’s just that he presents a spectacle that can’t be turned into commerce: no one is going to make a perfume commercial or ad for automobiles out of the imagery that comprises the film. (This is very different from Hollywood films lavish with product placement and that feature tie-ins with car companies – for instance, the Bond films have a symbiotic relationship with Jaguar.) The texture of the film is punk – its all home-made, a product manufactured outside the distribution networks of conventional capitalism: do-it-yourself like a screed printed on poor paper, mimeographed, and handed-out to random strangers, a sort of nightmare ‘zine. Hara’s out-of-focus images and non-synched sound are the equivalent of the punk garage bands blasting out anthems constructed on the basis of one mis-tuned chord.

Another influence on Hara’s film making is cinema verite. Hara’s picture, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on is generally cited as an outstanding example of cinema verite. And, of course, a number of documentary films made in the seventies broke new ground with respect to depicting on-screen subjects that were previously taboo – the classic example of a ground-breaking cinema verite film on this order is PBS’s An American Family, a series of films that showed intimate details in the life of the Louds, a dysfunctional family living in Santa Barbara. Other pictures of this sort are the Mayles’ brothers, Grey Gardens, (1975) about members of Jackie Kennedy’s extended family living in squalor in the East Hamptons and Shirley Clark’s Portrait of Jason (1967), a film about a homosexual African-American hustler and alcholic. Hara’s film is infinitely more "home-made" and aggressively ugly than these films but shares some of the same sensibility. We should remember that these kinds of movies were exceptionally controversial when they were made: the question posed by these films was whether the film maker was cynically exploiting the mental illness of the subjects of his or her film.

And this question, I think, hovers in a noteworthy way over all of Hara’s productions, most particularly Extreme Private Eros.

Brighter Sunnier Day (The Boy-Murder on Gulin Street)

Edward Yang's four-hour film, entitled in English Brighter Sunnier Day (below those words, the Chinese title appears:  characters that mean The Boy-Murder on Gulin Street) is not so much a movie as a vocation.  This is because the film is very long and extraordinarily complex, the Middlemarch of narrative films with over a hundred speaking roles and a dozen or so sub-plots.  Further, the film, made in Taiwan, is an island-picture, insular in that the movie pre-supposes the knowledge that people in Taipei would possess in the early nineties.   As the commentator, Tony Rayns, notes that this knowledge is not readily available to Americans or Europeans and, indeed, as time progresses, becomes increasingly inaccessible to East Asians as well.  Although the movie is very lucidly constructed, moving effortlessly between its subplots, we should not deny that it poses a number of challenges -- first, many of the characters will look alike to Western eyes and it is, sometimes, hard to tell who is who.  We may account this racism on the part of the viewer or simple inattentiveness, but it remains a fact that I had to consult the brochure accompanying this Criterion release several times in order to keep track of the players. (And I am presently working through the commentary -- a four-hour task.)  Second, the milieu is unfamiliar -- the movie involves refugees from Mainland China (Shanghai) who have fled the Communist regime and are living, uneasily, in houses confiscated from the Japanese in Taiwan.  These people are middle-class, conservative, and, mostly, hate the Communists.  They are also trapped -- they have been on Taiwan 12 years when the film begins around 1961 and have little hope of returning to their homes.  Taiwan seems to be a kind of austere military dictatorship and there are many tensions between the native-born Taiwanese and the immigrant Chinese. 

The film's plot resembles in some ways an immensely extended, and much more serene, even blissfully indifferent, version of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.  Two brothers live with their immigrant parents.  The film's protagonist is a kid named S'ir ("Fourth").  Si'r has been in trouble at high school, expelled, and is now attending a less prestigious night-school.  The town is divided between two violent youth gangs, the "Little Park Gang" and the lower class "217's."  Everyone listens to Elvis Presley and there are nascent rock-and-roll bands with falsetto singers.  Military convoys roll down the highways and, it seems, that there are only two options for the young men attending high school -- join a youth gang or the biggest, most aggressive gang of them all, the Taiwanese army.  The movie follows Si'r's attempts to navigate this mine-field.  But the picture is much larger than Si'r's story with subplots involving the hero's brothers and sisters, their uncles, and his parents -- Si'r's father, for instance, is suspected of disloyalty and mercilessly questioned in some Kafkaesque scenes by government secret police.  As with a Scorsese film, there are outbursts of shocking violence.  But the movie is astonishingly beautiful -- Yang was one of the greatest masters of the wide-screen format in the history of cinema.  His compositions are packed with people arranged with the perfection that you see in Degas' paintings and mezzotints, little floral bunches of people posed against empty space, sometimes with a dog or infant thrown in for a good measure.  Yang's interiors are geometric studies of enclosure, paper walls and tight corridors framing his characters in abstract patterns that sometimes look like elegantly colored Diebenkorn canvases.  Early in the film, Yang cuts from an interior to a nocturnal landscape, an image of lagoons and flowers and reflected streetlamps as strangely beautiful as a Monet painting.  Some kids heading for a rumble dart across the landscape and the image takes your breath away.  A few shots later, we see a movie set from overhead -- two boys have climbed up into the rafters to watch a film being made:  we look down into a schematic image of technicians, actresses, wardrobe people, all of them flapping their fans against the tropical heat -- the moving fans somehow unify the separate groupings of people and the image is densely detailed, gorgeous, similar to one of Thomas Struth's big photographs.  It's evident that Yang had one of cinema's greatest eyes and the movie is placidly gorgeous without being overt or unnecessarily "pretty" about its beauty. (You will see that I have exhausted myself in comparison to great, painterly artists -- and, although those similes are inexact, they are the best that I can do to articulate how this picture looks.)  Furthermore, the wide-screen invites the viewer to explore the images, to look past the central action, to study the background and the landscape, to move, in other words, through spaces in the frieze that are animated with activity to other spaces that are empty or still -- some of the most beautiful images contain highly charged action off-center to space that is vacant. 

Yang's staging of events is often oblique, even elliptical -- the principal events in the film's first part involve the death of Honey, the leader of the Little Park gang, and the reprisal committed by Honey's friends in league with a Taiwanese gang.  Although Honey is an important character -- he is world-weary at 19, has read a novel that he regards as the best of the martial arts books, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and seems inclined toward negotiation instead of fighting.  (Honey cites Tolstoy and wishes that someone would write a book about the gangs so that people "in a hundred years could learn from what we happened to us" -- referring, it seems, to the movie that we are watching.)   Shandong, the leader of the 217 gang, kills Honey with a gesture, shoving him in front of a moving vehicle -- and this after the two men have engaged in a quiet, even philosophical chat:  it's clear that neither of them have any inclination toward violence and their periodic assaults on one another, or opposing gang members, seem purely perfunctory.  (The casus belli is a rock-and-roll concert staged by the 217 gang on turf that is nominally controlled by Little Park -- but this is no more than a lame excuse for a fight that is fundamentally unnecessary.)  Yang doesn't show us what happens to Honey -- later, we see a corpse, some lights, and a small dog lapping up some blood.  But the event is staged in a way as to make it invisible -- because I kept falling asleep in this part of the film, I was confused:  the characters all act as if Honey is dead, but I didn't see that episode, was asleep for a while, I guess, when it happened and it took me several viewings of this part of the film to piece together what happened.  Honey's girlfriend, Ming, descends into catatonic mourning and has to be sent away.  Then, Honey's friends, with a Taiwanese gang, wreak bloody revenge on the 217, attacking their pool hall in the middle of a chaotic typhoon with samurai swords.  (This part of the movie seems to come from an entirely different film -- the Taiwanese have found a cache of Japanese weapons, daggers and swords, and, draped in rain-slickers and wearing coolie hats against the storm, they swarm into the pool hall and cut down the hapless 217ers.  The sequence is staged as if by the light of lightning flashes -- the power has failed in the neighborhood of 217 clubhouse and we see the violence only as briefly illumined acts offset by turbulent darkness.  It's a bravura sequence that looks like something from a Kurosawa movie and, in fact, has an entirely different texture and emotional timbre than the surrounding picture.)  On the same night as the 217 massacre, Si'r's father is summoned for interrogation by the Secret Police -- they suspect him of being a crypto-communist.  He is taken to deserted army barracks, harangued by debonair and articulate interrogators, made to write out his life-story (also a metaphor for the film) while huge blocks of ice melt in the corridors of the abandoned post -- the picture teeters here on the edge of surrealism but, ultimately, withdraws from that brink.  Si'r seems horrified by the carnage -- no one else pays any attention.  My summary omits family quarrels, nostalgic discussions of old Shanghai, efforts by finagle a place in day-school for Si'r, and various romantic encounters between the school boys and the girls -- Yang films all of this with equal analytical focus and this creates a center-periphery problem for the viewer:  it is hard for us to ascertain what is central to the narrative and what is peripheral.  This effect is intentional but a hardship for the audience -- this part of the movie is afflicted by longuers and, in a warm room, it is impossible to stay awake for much of this action.

The last third of the film shows Si'r's deterioration, confusion leading to his murder of Ming.  Si'r's mental collapse is paralleled by his father's ruin.  Released inexplicably from State custody, Si'r's father loses his job, becomes increasingly paranoid, and succumbs to despair -- Yang handles these calamities with tact:  as a character deteriorates, his collapse occurs increasingly off-screen.  For the last half-hour of the film, neither Si'r or his father are shown except obliquely -- we see them from odd angles, glimpsing them in the distance, but, primarily, know of their misfortune by the effects that it has on others.  Si'r insults a nurse, gets called to account at school where he, apparently, assaults the supercilious and arrogant headmaster with a baseball bat -- rather comically, there is a big barrel full of baseball bats confiscated from gang members in the Principal's office.  Expelled, Si'r studies hard to regain admission but becomes confused about his relationship to Ming.  (In fact, he really has no relationship at all with her -- they seem to be casual friends.)  Si'r tells Ming that he will replace the late lamented Honey and defend her.  With realistic and practical acumen, she says that she doesn't need his protection. Enraged, Si'r stabs her to death on Gulin Street.  He is sentenced to death, but not executed -- instead, he serves 15 years in prison.  We see Si'r's younger sister singing in her church choir.  Si'r's friend, the little Elvis fan, has written to Elvis Presley and sent him a cover of "Are you lonesome tonight". Elvis responds with a letter and a gift and the boy makes a tape for Si'r, asking the guards to bring it to him.   The guards contemptuously throw the tape away and the movie ends with a list of Si'r's contemporaries who have graduated from High School.  The last half of the film can't draw the various threads of narrative into any meaningful pattern and the immense movie raises more questions than it answers.  Si'r's murder of Ming is shockingly unmotivated and despicable -- it seems inconsistent with the boy's character as it has been developed in the film.  The bravura sequence involving the extermination of the 217 gang leads nowhere -- in fact, the gangs, more or less, vanish from the film during its second half.  The pleasures that the movie affords are its precise and lucid presentation of surfaces -- that is, the way a school gymnasium basketball court looked in 1961, the various gardens and landscapes that the film explores, and the luminous interiors with their diaphanous wings of mosquito netting.  Yang's tendency is to show you something and, then, provide explanatory information much later in the film and this makes the movie very hard to understand on first viewing.  For instance, there is a spectacular scene in which Si'r's father beats Si'r's older brother, the hapless Lao Er.  Si'r watches from outside in the garden.  Earlier we have seen Lao Er at the abandoned headquarters for the defunct 217 gang playing pool.  During the beating, Si'r's sister tells him that Lao Er somehow learned that Si'r had stolen and pawned his mother's watch (an event that reoccurs several times in the movie).  To protect his brother from discovery, Lao Er went to the 217 pool hall, placed some bets and won some money, but the cash was discovered before he could redeem the watch.  As a loyal brother, Lao Er takes the beating without disclosing that it was Si'r who stole and pawned the watch.  When we see Lao Er in the pool hall, we have no idea what he is doing; similarly, during the protracted beating, we don't know why Si'r's father is assaulting his oldest son.  The film making is gorgeous but confusing -- presumably Yang wants us to experience the chaos of events just as they are presented to his characters, but this cuts against the analytical, almost geometrical clarity of the film's mise en scene -- spaces and relationship of characters in space are always lucidly presented.  And, the story seems fundamentally inconsequential, too slim to support the gargantuan length of the film -- it's hard to make a meaningful and dramatic climax when nothing is at stake:  in effect, Si'r kills Ming on a whim and based on a total misunderstanding.  He imagines a relationship with her that doesn't exist.  In the final shot, we hear a list of students who have successfully graduated from High School -- the students are going to study Chinese literature or foreign languages.  Of course, this is the group of successful students that would have included Si'r but for the misadventures shown by the film.  But what if Si'r had graduated, how would things have been any better?  We don't see that any of the refugees from Shanghai are actually happy or successful.  (In fact, as Edward Yang's own career shows, the route to success on Taiwan runs through America, and, in fact, the computer programming capitals on the West Coast -- Yang worked as a computer programmer for eight years in Seattle before returning to Taiwan to work in the film industry.)  Would Si'r have been better off with a degree in English literature and working as an ex-pat in San Jose?    

Our Beloved Month of August

When writing about Miguel Gomes 2008 film, Our Beloved Month of August, the temptation  is to clarify the film, normalize it, and make the movie seem less strange than it really is.  Every description of the film that I have read has this effect and it is inimical to the way an audience actually experiences the movie.  In the first shot, we see majestically combed roosters clearly agitated by something -- as the shot continues, we see that a little fox has entered the chicken coop and is eyeing the roosters:  the image is magisterial, at once, strange and suspenseful, shot from a peculiar angle as if to mirror the perplexity of the big, bright roosters.  In the second shot, we see that the fox is separated from the chickens by a wire-mesh.  But the mesh is inefficacious and the fox bursts in among the chickens -- the film, then, cuts away to a pavilion where someone is crooning in a soft-rock pop song; it is night and the weight of the summer is palpable in the scene, an erotic humidity and warmth and, while the singer performs, gradually couple gather on the dance-floor, entering, however, from an unexpected angle.   At the end of the film, Gomes castigates his soundman, a figure that we have been watching throughout the movie, for recording in nature sounds that can't possibly be present -- pop tunes, apparently, picked-up by the soundman's microphone on its lance-like baton.  Each member of the crew berates the soundman who maintains that he didn't do anything wrong -- on the soundtrack we hear forest sounds, birds chirping and the wind in trees, gradually supplanted by faint pop song that grows in volume.  While crewmembers are berating the hapless soundman, their names and roles in the production are shown on-screen.  When the sequence is over, the film's final credits are projected and the movie ends. 

Much of the movie follows the logic, or illogic, of these sequences.  Only gradually, after about an hour, does the audience sense that there are actual characters in the movie, people extruded above, as it were, the documentary milieu -- as soon as we become accustomed to the fact that we are watching a lyrical documentary designed according to associative and poetic principles, suddenly, we are confronted with fact that there is, in fact, a story, that the story becomes increasingly melodramatic, and, ultimately, seems to seize control of the film, turning the movie into a family melodrama with some kinky attributes, a bit like a film by Fassbinder or Douglas Sirk.  The narrative seems wholly improvised -- at first, we don't know that we are seeing any kind of narrative at all.  The pleasure that film yields is that aspects of the picture that we initially perceived as purely documentary become assimilated into the improvised story.  For instance, we have seen a red fire-truck somewhat incongruously touring the mountainsides of the Portuguese forest where the film takes place.  These seems are vaguely comical and we can't quite make any narrative sense out of them.  Later, we are introduced to two girls who work at a fire-tower, one succeeding the other with regard to their sentinel duties -- these girls are fire-watchers atop a high mountain in the forested range.  The girls gradually become central characters in the narrative and, at the end of the film, there is a wild-fire that has the melodramatic function of ending a bitter family argument and, in fact, reuniting characters who had disavowed any further relationship with one another.  (The fire clearly stands for sexual love-- the fires of passion.)  Here is the question that film poses:  did this imagery of fires and fire-fighting drive the narrative and yield, through improvisatory means the narrative or was the film maker cunningly foreshadowing narrative events by concealing in plain sights, as it were, this theme within the documentary aspects of the movie.  I don't think this question can be answered and therein lies part of the charm of Our Beloved Month of August. 

At first, we seem to be watching a documentary about some kind of musical festival occurring in a rural and mountainous region of Portugal.  Bands appear on a dramatically lit stage, are identified by super-title over the image, and perform -- the music that they play is not some kind of European "roots" or traditional music; rather, it is ingratiating key-board and synthesizer-heavy Euro-pop.  At first, the film plays as a kind of movie-essay, the sort of film that Chris Marker used to make -- there are some portentous voice-overs and we see lots of tracking shots of wooded and hilly landscape.  A big motorcycle rally is underway and the narrow, winding roads on the mountain side are, often, blitzed by swarms of bikers -- near the start of the film, we see an immense campground where the bikers have gathered.  There is a look-out atop one of the mountains, a statuesque ridge where giant wind rotors are turning, and some beautiful streams where people swim and sunbathe near a dam.  Local people are filmed in their habitats telling stories about how the festival originally involved a testicle feast and one man recounts the story of ax murder.  It appears that the film is documenting the Feast of the Lady of Conception and, at twenty minute intervals, there are images of long processions in which the people carrying sacred figures on litters going uphill meet and pass similar crowds descending the steep streets.  Bands play in out of the way alleys and there seems to be a lot of feasting underway.  From time to time, a man from Lisbon admonishes the film crew to get underway -- Gomes, who plays himself in the film, says that he has to record sound effects because he doesn't yet have actors.  At the climax of the religious festival, someone -- apparently the town drunk -- will have to jump off a high medieval bridge over a ravine where the river flows.  He isn't anxious to do this -- last time, he jumped he hurt his ankle.  Frequently, we see the sound man recording in groves of trees or on the mountainsides -- of course, we never see the camera crew:  the film's point-of-view is the camera crew and the reason we don't see any footage being shot is because the only camera on location is the one recording the various random, or seemingly, random snippets of film that comprise the movie.  At one point, the villagers gather to see some rushes of a "terror movie based on Little Red Riding Hood" -- this may be the project the filmmakers have come to produce.  An older woman appears in the clip of film, scary and formidable as a witch -- we later see her from time to time in the streets of the town, a heavy-set, jolly old woman nothing like her image on the screen.  (The locals aren't fooled -- they laugh loudly at the horror scenes.)  A boar is butchered and an old man climbs into a deer stand.  Two girls try to get parts in the movie and are inexplicably turned-away -- the crew is more interested in playing quoits.  Gomes is a very cunning and intelligent director and this seemingly random footage probably fits together and forms patterns that are not immediately apparent, but, nonetheless, meaningful -- in part, an associative principle connects the short sequences:  while we watch a religious procession, a man talks about being healed by an encounter with the plaster figurine of the Lady of Healing; in the next scene, we see a man singing karaoke -- the song is about being saved by the Virgin Mary, although the tune and melody aren't sacred sounding at all, but more of the saccharine Euro-pop that characterizes the soundtrack.  (Our Beloved Month of August, if nothing else, is a musical, featuring about 12 fully performed songs.)  Gradually, we begin to notice recurring characters and, in the last hour, there is a story:  a girl named Tania sings in a family band with her father, Domingos, and her uncle.  The girl's mother has run away from the family to Lisbon -- it's not quite clear why she abandoned the family.  Father and daughter have a close, almost freakishly close, relationship -- at one point, the villagers accuse the couple of incest.  The lead guitar player in the band is Helder, Tania's 15 year old cousin.  Helder and Tania fall in love.  This leads to conflict in the family, problems in the band as well, and, ultimately, there is a showdown between the young lovers and Tania's father -- catastrophe is averted by a fire on the mountain in which the family members are trapped.  The fire is a deus ex machina that resolves the major tensions in the film, although the movie has trouble ending -- I counted about six or seven separate endings.

Our Beloved Month of August is fiendishly clever but overlong.  The story that is improvised out of all of the fragments of apparently documentary footage is melodramatic and slight, if pleasant -- young lovers (there is a subplot involving another girl Lena and her admirers) enjoying long lissome summer nights together.  But the story isn't strong enough to sustain the film's length and, in any event, its clearly disposable -- something Gomes constructed out of bits and pieces and, then, improvised a few acted (or dramatic) scenes.  The film's length is integral, however, to the very gradual development of the plot -- the narrative consists of a series of secrets disclosed to the audience only very, very slowly and with immense hesitation.  If the whole plot were summarily presented, we would probably reject the film as banal and uninteresting -- part of the pleasure in the picture is fitting together the fragments to construct the narrative.  I think it's a film that is probably designed to be watched several times -- some parts of the film have a meta-narrative aspect that is fantastically complex.  In one scene, we see two men from behind at one of the ubiquitous mountain lookouts -- one man tells the other that he's concerned about the film makers.  "They seem awfully disorganized," he says.  The other man responds:  "Well, it's just their method."  The first man reveals, then, that he was the fellow who talked about being cured by our Lady of Healing -- "they recorded me without my knowing," he says.  Of course, we are seeing the two men from behind and this begs the question of whether they know they are being recorded and filmed in this sequence.  Both men are part of the film's narrative -- but how do we distinguish the narrative from the documentary aspects of the movie?  Can this even be accomplished?  In one scene, Helder masturbates, apparently to images of Tania's missing mother, someone called Auntie Rose Marie -- this sequence is clearly staged.  A few minutes later, some Belgian dudes approach the girls who are swimming at the dam and try to pick them up -- this sequence seems completely documentary, although the scene plays a role in dramatic narrative.  Was this scene staged or is it documentary? 

Murnau's Tabu

Murnau’s Tabu


　

　
An aura of predestined doom surrounds Murnau’s 1931 Tabu. There are several causes for this. First, the film is Murnau’s final work, premiered 9 days after his death in a motor vehicle accident. Thus, viewers are wont to impute a sense of fatality to the movie. This is a fallacy – no doubt, Murnau planned a long and happy life after completing the picture -- but, probably, unavoidable. Second, the film itself seems to labor under a curse – whispered rumors of hauntings and malign influences surround the picture. Finally, the movie’s subject matter itself, a weird combination of German expressionist gloom and South Seas romance inflects the way that we approach the film: there is a price to be paid for innocent eroticism and that price is death.

F. W. Murnau was born Friedrich Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany in 1888. His family was comfortably wealthy and mercantile. Murnau studied philology at the University of Berlin but gravitated into the world of theater. Homosexuals were welcome in that field, particularly in Max Reinhardt’s sphere, and Murnau was, more or less, openly gay. Theatrical careers were not respectable in late 19^th century (Wilhelmine) Germany and the young man changed his name from the rather banal and crude-sounding Plumpe to Murnau when he worked as an assistant director with Reinhardt during the years 1911 to 1914. (Murnau is the name of an artist’s colony where Kandinsky and other luminaries of the early Expressionist and Blue Rider movements spent their summers – the director also had a cottage in that village.)

Murnau enlisted in the army during World War One. Initially, he served in the infantry, an assignment that he thought boring. He used family influence to finagle his way into the Luftwaffe. Emulating Baron von Richthofen, Murnau flew a number of successful combat missions as a fighter pilot. He probably survived the war due to a mistake – he got caught in fog over the Alps and had to make a forced landing. The airfield was in Switzerland and he was interred there for the last year of the war. The other combat pilots with whom he served were all killed, including a handsome young man who had been Murnau’s lover.

After the war, Murnau worked in Berlin in the film industry. Most of his early films are lost. He revolutionized the movie industry with his vampire picture, Nosferatu (released in 1922), the first film of that kind to be an international smash-hit. After a few more pictures made in Germany, most notably his version of Faust and The Last Laugh, Murnau emigrated to Hollywood where he was hired by Fox Studios. His first American film, Sunrise, is a monument to the late Silent film industry, often characterized as the most beautiful movie ever made. Sunrise won the first Academy Award bestowed in Hollywood for best picture. Murnau directed three other films for Fox including City Girl, a Kammerspiel quite unlike the extravagant earlier films involving elaborate spectacle and camera effects. (Murnau was versatile and City Girl shows that he could effectively direct a light romantic comedy with melodramatic accents.) The other American films Murnau made are now lost.

One of Murnau’s close friends in Berlin was Walter Spies. Spies was the son of the German ambassador to Russia and had been, mostly, raised in Moscow and a dacha in the Ural mountains. Spies was also homosexual and closely affiliated with the Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde – he knew Eisenstein and many Soviet dancers including Anna Archipenko. In 1923, Spies traveled as a collier to the South Seas and took up residence in central Indonesia. For several years, he worked for one of the Indonesian sultans as a director of his patron’s orchestras, including a Balinese gamelan ensemble. Fascinated by the gamelan music,

Spies moved to Bali where he also studied traditional dance forms.

Murnau’s Hollywood films after Sunrise (1927) were not successful at the box-office. Irving Thalberg suggested that Murnau travel to the South Seas to make a film with Robert Flaherty. Murnau hoped to visit Spies with whom he remained in contact by letters. Accordingly, Murnau agreed to the assignment, primarily because it would give him an excuse to see his old friend again.

Robert Flaherty was famous for his documentaries. In the minds of most film audiences, Flaherty was best known as the director of Nanook of the North (1922). Flaherty had made another documentary in the South Seas at Bora Bora and Papeete in French Tahiti– Moana released in 1926. Moana is a hybrid, a documentary involving many staged sequences – today, the film would be characterized as "docufiction." Flaherty was blustery, outspoken, and aggressive Irishman who was drunk most of the time. Murnau was concerned that it would be difficult to collaborate with him. Flaherty was bogged down in a film about the Indians at Acoma pueblo – Acoma, the City in the Sky – and so Thalberg closed-down production on that film, being shot in western New Mexico, and sent Flaherty to the south seas to make a fiction film co-directed with W.S. VanDyke. That film released in 1929 was called White Shadows in the South Seas. Accordingly, Flaherty was still in Tahiti when Thalberg sent Murnau to those islands to work on Tabu.

Murnau’s sense of geography was a little inexact. He seems to have thought that Tahiti and Indonesia were the same place. Instead, Murnau was disappointed to find that he was supposed to work with Flaherty in Tahiti and not Bali. For a number of weeks, Murnau collaborated with Flaherty and, ultimately, the two men agreed upon the script that was ultimately shot. By this point, Flaherty’s alcoholism had become an insoluble problem and Murnau complained that he couldn’t work with his co-director. Flaherty was removed from the project. Murnau, then, persuaded the Studio to send for Walter Spies. Spies came from Bali and agreed to serve as a dance consultant on the film – he was responsible for choreographing the motions and gestures of the native actors participating in Tabu. Although the script is a collaboration between Robert Flaherty and F. W. Murnau, the footage accumulated to make the film was almost entirely shot under the direction of the German. (On the first day of production, Flaherty’s camera jammed and ripped film passing through it; after that day, all camerawork was directed by Murnau). Murnau’s process was to develop immense amounts of footage and, then, work the actors on editing – it is said that 90 hours of film were shot, mostly around Bora-Bora.

Murnau returned to Hollywood to supervise editing the film. He completed the picture and planned a trip to Santa Barbara to celebrate the successful wrap of the film. Murnau, who did not drive, selected his chauffeurs on the basis of their attractiveness and not their skill in operating a motor vehicle. His 14-year-old Filipino house-boy was driving his car when he lost control and slammed into a telephone pole along side the Pacific Coast Highway just south of Santa Barbara near Rincon Beach. Murnau was instantly killed. He was 42. The director’s body was returned to Germany where he was buried at Stahnsdorf, about 12 miles from Berlin. Greta Garbo, a close friend, commissioned a death mask and kept it in her study for the rest of her life. (The death mask is claimed to be the nexus of paranormal phenomena – rapping and knocking noises and other ghostly manifestations.)

Murnau and Spies had built a house together in Tahiti at Papeete. Apparently, they selected a location for the house that was itself tabu and the structure was also said to be haunted. It burned down in the 1935, was rebuilt and burned down again in the 1980's. After Murnau’s death, Spies returned to Bali where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1938, Spies was arrested for homosexual conduct and put in prison. He was released in 1939 after the intervention of Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, with whom he was friends. In 1942, Spies was interned as an enemy non-combatant – Indonesia, at that time, was part of the Dutch East Indies. The authorities sent Spies back to Germany. With other deported persons, he was loaded on the S. S. Imhof for return to Europe. A few miles from port, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the Imhof – it sank and Spies drowned.

A year ago, someone broke into Murnau’s grave at Stahnsdorf and stole the great director’s skull. Wax was found on some of the other bones, suggesting some kind of occult ritual. Murnau’s huge skeleton – the man was 6 foot 11 inches tall – was the only corpse desecrated. Murnau’s brothers, also occupying the grave, were not disturbed. To date, the skull has not been returned.




The Apogee of the Silent Film
Tabu was one of only two silent films released by American studios in 1931. The other film, also estimable, was Charley Chaplin’s City Lights. (Only Murnau and Chaplin had sufficient prestige in Hollywood to compel the studios to yield to them with respect to allowing these films to be released as silent movies.) The aura of doom surrounding the picture also arises in this context: Tabu is the last film of its kind. (Edgar Ulmer, the production liaison on the film, remained in Hollywood while Murnau was in the South Seas shooting the movie. Murnau was in Polynesia from May 12, 1929 through November 8, 1930 – that is, during the first broad application of sound technology to film. Ulmer wrote to Murnau and provided him with a very lengthy and detailed technical account as to the new technology, suggesting that Murnau consider re-shooting some parts of the film with synchronized sound. Murnau declined and said that he thought that the merits of silent film were so obvious that the art form would continue to exist and survive side-by-side with sound films – Murnau thought that more poetic or lyrical films were well suited to being produced and projected in silent format. Accordingly, Murnau believed that film as an art would in the future embrace both silent films like Tabu as well as talking pictures.)

The German critic, Lotte Eisner, writing about Tabu calls the film the "apogee of the art of silent film" and "visually perfect." Murnau was famous for his moving camera and for streamlining his narratives so that very few titles were necessary to explain the images – his picture The Last Laugh (in German, Der Letzte Mann) was the first important silent film to be made entirely with out intertitles. In Polynesia, Murnau couldn’t move the camera; the infrastructure necessary for those effects did not exist. As a result, Murnau relied upon powerful evocative, sculptural staging of his actors against lush tropical landscapes and carefully designed editing. The movie’s cinematography was awarded an Academy Award for best camerawork in 1931.

　


Intertitles
Tabu has no titles descriptive of the action. There is no scene-setting after the first ethnographic titles and no extraneous characterization of the images – in essence, what you see is what you get.

As in Nosferatu, Murnau uses documents in lieu of titles – Hitu carries a scroll announcing his mission to seize a virgin from Bora-Bora. The couple’s dilemma in Papeete, Tahiti is shown by diary entries and the credit account maintained by the pygmy Chinese merchant. Murnau’s felt intertitles interrupted films and were generally unnecessary if the movie was coherently constructed.

　

Tabu and Expressionism

Tabu marks the confluence of German expressionist interest in the South Sea Islands with Hollywood film making. As we have seen, Murnau produced Tabu with money from Hollywood and, indeed, returned to Santa Monica after the movie was complete. About the same time, German painters and sculptors were exploiting South Sea and primitivist motifs in their art.

In the late 19^th century, Germany’s imperialist aspirations led it to annex as colonies substantial territories in Oceania. The largest German colonies in the south Pacific were Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (the northeast quadrant of Papua, New Guinea) and the Bismarck Archipelago, a number of fairly large islands off the east coast of New Guinea. These lands, with a dozen other island groups, comprised Deutsche Neuguinea – that is, German New Guinea. Before the First World War, German artists, naturists (nudists), mystics, and theosophists visited these colonies in swarms. Papua New Guinea and the south sea islands were thought to be a natural paradise, a place where human nature had not been deformed by economic or religious oppression. The Germans were obsessed with "race’ and "purity" and the people dwelling on small islands surrounded by thousands of miles of water were considered examples of undiluted and ethnically pure human beings, Naturvoelker ("Nature-people") living in accord with ancient tribal laws that expressed perfectly their racial essence. Although many German artists were content to study these specimens of undisfigured humanity by viewing pictures of them in ethnographic museums and by sketching their masks and other ritual objects, several of the greatest Expressionist artists actually traveled to German Polynesia and Papua New Guinea to live among the people on those islands. (In this respect, the Germans were following in the footsteps of Paul Guaguin, the grest post-impressionist painter who left Breton – and his wife and children – for an uninhibited life in French Polynesia.) Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde both spent considerable time in the German colonies in the South Seas and produced innumerable images of the people and landscapes of that place.

The interest in Oceania by German expressionists reflects an essential and motivating impulse for that artistic movement – art should express the inner essence of that which it depicts; optical appearance is secondary to the emotion that the object of contemplation induces in the viewer. Expressionist art attempts to convey the emotional essence of an encounter with the world and the people in the world – certain fundamental forms express certain fundamental emotions or forces that exist in reality. The artist’s objective is to pierce through optical or visual appearance to achieve an unmediated encounter with these fundamental forces. In effect, expressionism was one of the last bastions of Platonic thought, the idea that all appearances are underwritten, and arise from, essential forces and powers that are concealed from the eye. The veneer of civilization that religion and economics imparts to the man who lives in the city shields, and conceals from him, the real powers that exist in the world. These powers can be accessed through art or by ritual. The Naturvoelker of the South Seas were imagined to be people that lived in close harmony with these essential forces and powers and could, therefore, guide over-civilized Europeans into an encounter with these mysteries, ultimately, the enigmas of sex and love and death. (Imperium, a wonderful recent novel by the German writer Christian Kracht dramatizes many of these ideas – the story involves a German mystic who travels to the Solomon Islands before World War One to found a coco-vore utopia, that is, a utopia where its inhabitants eat nothing but coconuts.)

Although Murnau was interested in Expressionist ideas, I would hesitate to characterize him as expressionistic film maker. Actual expressionistic film making, properly characterized, is limited to a handful of movies made between 1916 and 1920, most notably The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Visual expressionism, particularly as expressed in the graphic arts, involved very significant distortions of optical reality – narrative films are generally wedded to an appearance of accurate optical reality; therefore, the kind of expressionist distortions evident in a film like Dr. Caligari were a dead-end – audiences wanted movies to reflect some semblance of optical reality.

Murnau’s involvement with Expressionism, nonetheless, is significant in several respects. (One key factor is Murnau’s name – the great director’s actual last name was Plumpe, not a particularly inspiring moniker; F.W. Plumpe assumed the stage-name "Murnau" because he particularly admired a German village with that name, a place in the country frequented by the great Expressionist painters and closely associated with them.) In my estimation, Murnau distorts reality to express inner states of being inconspicuously and without overtly disrupting the fiction that the filmgoer is seeing something realistic. In his massivley engineered (some would say over-engineered films) of late twenties – for instance, Faust and Sunrise, A Story of Two Humans – the most conspicuous expressionist effect is the director’s use of light. Murnau thought of light as ‘raum-gestaltende" effect – that is, "space-creating". Accordingly, in Faust and Sunrise, lighting effects create glares and halos, zones of intense brightness surrounded by the densest darkness. Murnau’s expressionist interests, accordingly, often appear in the director’s deployment of exceedingly non-naturalistic effects of chiaroscuro, intense light and dark with figures casting inky, ominous shadows.

Filming in the South Seas, Murnau was forced to mostly use natural light with reflectors. Therefore, he is not able to engineer the dense chiaroscuro that characterizes his later German films and some, but not all, of the surviving Hollywood pictures. (Murnau’s comedy City Girl shot before he departed for the South Seas is a conventionally lit, sunny, and pleasant romantic comedy.) Stripped of some of his characteristic pictorial resources (moving camera and intensely dramatic lighting effects), Murnau, nonetheless, demonstrates several strong Expressionist affinities in the way that Tabu is made.

How does Murnau portray space and topography in Tabu? I think close analysis of the film warrants a conclusion that Murnau’s use of optical space in Tabu is expressionistic. This effect is sub rosa – we don’t immediately perceive that the space occupied by Murnau’s Polynesian islanders is irrational and non-naturalistic. But if we attend close to the film’s mise-en-scene, we encounter puzzling incongruities. These incongruities are best explicable in these terms – the space in which the islanders live is constructed expressionistically: it conforms to an inner reality.

In the first half of the film, "Paradise", we are shown a world that is completely open in all dimensions. The world is a sort of playground for the desires of the Polynesian islanders. The paradox that the film presents in thematic terms is this: the Polynesians can effortlessly enjoy any pleasure that they want except the greatest pleasure, the consummation of sexual desire. (This theme of forbidden love undoubtedly arises to some degree from Murnau’s homosexuality. You can have anything you want except the person that you love.) In the opening sequence, Matiha throws spear after spear into shallow water, impaling fish without any apparent difficulty. (An omitted sequence from the film, later released as "Treibjagd im Sud-See" ("Fish hunt in South Seas") in 1940, shows the entire village driving fish into the shallows and, then, harvesting them by the hundreds – this is an intensely dramatic sequence, but one that shows fairly arduous efforts required to sustain life in these idyllic islands. One can speculate that Murnau excluded the footage from "Paradise" because it shows that real organization and the considerable effort of everyone in the village is necessary to harvest fish from the sea – that is, the frenzied activity of the sequence interferes with the idea of the Edenic "paradise" in the opening part of the film.) Space and landscape provide no obstacles – the boys effortlessly climb a waterfall to access the interior of the island. Motion is free and unobstructed in all dimensions – one boy scrambles a hundred feet up a palm tree without any difficulty; people use natural sluices in waterfalls to rapidly move between different locations. When a ship appears far beyond the boundary reef, everyone in the village is instantly waterborne – even tiny children are confident enough on the sea to leap into outrigger canoes and rush through turbulent seas, there is substantial surf at the reef, to swarm onto the boat. Climbing from the canoes onto the European vessels poses no problem – the natives seem preternaturally agile. Everyone moves like a dancer and, even, scenes of prosaic action involve actors who move as gracefully as ballet dancers.

But, of course, all of this is stylized. We can see this in the opening sequence – Matahi does not initially stand on the sharp, painfully jagged piece of coral in the surf. In fact, he stands behind the nasty-looking coral plinth in the opening scene on sand – the tide has not yet reached the coral boulder. But in the third or fourth shot of the movie, time has obviously passed and, now, the coral boulder is surrounded by water. In the following scenes, Matahi stands on the sharp rock, but seems uncomfortable. Within the first thirty seconds, the film presents us with shots that don’t match – in the opening scene, the surf is far away and rock stands on the beach; in the second scene showing the rock, the ocean is now all around the boulder. The blithe way that the natives move through their landscape is contradicted by various cues – first, the boys in the water seem to be walking or scampering carefully so as to not slice open their feet on sharp coral. We have a sense that the landscape somehow is too rugged, too sharp, too angular – that it opposes the way that the people move.

Simply put, the topography of the opening forty minutes of the film makes no realistic sense. A flower garland, apparently, drops from the waterfall that decorously slides down a coastal cliff. (The cliff looks sharp and dangerous, but the actors seem able to scramble up the cliff without any difficulty – my suspicion is that we are seeing the best of a hundred takes with respect to ascending the waterfall.) The boys decide to climb to the top of the waterfall. We see them begin that ascent and, then, immediately the film cuts to a waterfall and punch-bowl-like plunge pool where the maidens are bathing. The editing suggests that these locations are adjacent – in fact, later we find that the waterfalls and punch-bowl plunge pools are far in the interior of the island not directly above the coastal cascade as the cutting initially suggests. The action with the girls among the waterfalls is confusing – how many waterfalls are there: one or two or three? Probably, there are two waterfalls although this is hard to decipher. (In fact, it’s not clear where the waterfall scenes were shot – there are no waterfalls on Bora Bora.) The landscape with the waterfalls is weirdly accommodating – it’s less of a landscape than a water-park. And this stylization is essential to the film’s mood. When we ask "How many waterfalls are there?" The film answers: as many as are desired. The landscape seems to shift and warp according to what the characters desire – the topography in other words is pliable, it bends to the desires of the protagonists. Very few of the shots comprising the first section of the film match – for instance, when Matahi surprises Rire, he appears from a place where we don’t expect him to be. How did he magically get behind Rire? Again, the landscape seems less of a real place and more of a dreamscape of desires that are offered up by the terrain as soon as imagined.

(Opposed to this idyllic and strangely accommodating landscape is the impulsive violence of the characters. When the women beat Rire, they seem to be actually hurting her. Rire seems to have blood (or, at least, Schmutz) of some kind all over her legs and shoulders – Matahi wipes off the substance whatever it is. The other woman involved in the cat-fight has a very noticeable black-eye. In other words, this is a paradise in which people strike one another, hold each other’s heads under the water, and, in fact, get visibly injured.)

The uncertainty about the film’s landscape is enhanced in the bravura sequence involving the islanders taking to the sea to clamber onto the sailing ship. A dramatic, double-horned mountain looms over the village. But where exactly is the mountain? It seems to shift position in relationship to the bay as the scene progresses. The geometry of the bay is uncertain and the distance of the sailing ship from shore seems also to vary from shot-to-shot. The armada of canoes striking out across the bay provides Murnau with a splendid opportunity to move his camera and the effects that he achieves in this sequence are extraordinary, particularly the fugue-like contrast between motion and counter-motion – the canoes hurtling seaward, while Matahi heads to shore to pick up his little brother. This part of the film has an exhilarating character, a sense of great freedom and motion, a visceral joyous energy that is suddenly impeded by the ominous figure of the priest, Hitu. Prior to the appearance of Hitu, the viewer has the impression that the island and sea around it are perfectly, and effortlessly, penetrable – people can move in every direction without encountering any kind of obstruction.

Murnau uses space and topography in a similarly non-naturalistic way in the "Paradise Lost" half of the film. Hitu appears without warning out of nowhere – it is unclear as to whether we are to interpret his appearances as real or imaginary. French Tahiti (Papeete) where the second half of the film takes place is ruined, a paradise lost infected with booze and cash-money. Rire and Matahi’s destruction is over-determined – of course, we can accept Murnau’s narrative showing Hitu’s malign influence as the cause of their doom, but, we are, also, I think warranted in construing Hitu figuratively, as an embodiment of the forces that destroy the couple. And, of course, the champagne poured by Matahi in the party, and purchased on credit, precipitates the film’s catastrophe – the native people of Tahiti were, in fact, savaged by alcohol, traded their women for booze, and, then, economically destroyed. Matahi and Reri’s plight seems a metonym for the calamities that contact with Europeans inflicted upon the South Sea islanders.

One of the most noteworthy and memorable scenes in silent cinema is Nosferatu’s appearance on a death-ship in Bremen harbor in Murnau’s 1921 unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. With rats underfoot, Nosferatu slinks away from the ghost-vessel that has glided to a stop in the misty, dark harbor. The appearance of Nosferatu is a harbinger of doom for the young lovers in that film and, also, symbolizes the onset of a great pestilence, rat-born plague, that kills most of the people in Bremen. In Tabu, Murnau returns to the image of death gliding ashore in a sailing ship – it is interesting that the ship carrying Hitu is conspicuously European in appearance. This verifies my suspicion that Hitu, in part, embodies the forces of alcohol and mercantilism brought to Polynesia by the Europeans – in fact, one might argue that the failure to placate the Polynesian gods by offering Reri as a virgin consecrated to them has, perhaps, doomed the entire culture to ruin at the hands of the Europeans. In any event, the appearance of Hitu is non-naturalistic and ambiguous, signified by imagery of fatalistic doom invoking Murnau’s earlier vampire film – one of the first great international blockbuster hits of the silent film era.

At the end of the movie, Matahi’s desperate pursuit of the skiff in which Hitu has abducted Reri is designed as a kind of anxiety nightmare. Hitu’s skiff glides smoothly as if yanked over the waters by an invisible agency. By contrast, Matahi’s pursuit is obstructed not once, but twice, by barrier reefs exposed above the water, painfully sharp coral outcroppings that the young lover has to run across. Why don’t these reefs block Hitu’s skiff? Why don’t the exposed reefs pose an obstruction to the old witchdoctor? As we have seen in other contexts, space is used expressionistically – the topography that is unimpeded, open sea to the skiff, is blocked with painful barricades of coral reef as far as Matahi is concerned. As in a nightmare, Matahi’s pursuit of the skiff keeps encountering obstacles, piles of rock rising enigmatically from the sea that he must cross. The final sequence could not be improved in terms of concise brevity and uncanny, but precise horror. Matahi comes close to the boat and seizes a rope dangling from it. Hiru locks the girl away but putting down the hatch over her – figuratively, he is sealing her into a dark casket. We don’t even really see her face when he locks her away – she has already departed into his dark realm. The close-up of Hitu’s hand using a preternaturally sharp knife to slice through the rope to which Matahi is clinging is an astounding image – not only does the film show us a literal event, the lifeline to Matahi being cut, but, also, something larger and more intensely ominous: Hitu is one of the Fates, Nemesis, cutting the thread that symbolizes a human’s life.

As Nemesis expands to seize control of the film, the idea of tabu similarly expands. At first, Tabu is just the name of the film, the title of a story. Then, Reri becomes tabu. Later, we see a sign posted in the sea signifying that a part of the lagoon is tabu. Then, the film ends with the word filling the screen – tabu has come to mean "end" and, now, it seems that an entire world has fallen under it’s malign spell.

Murnau described the film’s theme in these terms: "Men are given to create their own tragedies when destiny is too generous with them."

　


A Snatch
of poetry:

(...at eve they)


Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,

Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,

Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,

Nor pause, nor perch, h overing on untamed wing!
These lines are from Coleridge’s poem "The Eolian Harp". Birds of paradise were known to the English primarily as anatomical specimens collected in the South Sea islands and, particularly, Papua New Guinea. The natives who prepared the specimens skinned them and removed their legs. This practice led to a belief that the birds were without feet and, according to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, "spent their lives hovering in the air and feeding on nectar."

　


Return to the Islands
In 1930, when Tabu was being filmed in French Polynesia (Tautira), Henri Matisse was visiting the island. Matisse closely observed the film’s production and made many sketches of Reri and the Polynesian landscapes. Matisse’s watercolors and sketches of the Polynesian girl are among his most evocative works.

Later, Reri of Tabu was recuited by Paramount to tour the United States. (Reri was not quite the naive Polynesian maiden shown in the film – Murnau met her in a bar in French Tahiti where she was working as a cocktail waitress; her name was Anne Chevalier.) Reri came from Polynesia to the United States where she promoted by the studio as a new starlet, the debutante of the hour. She performed in the Ziegfield Follies and made many professional appearances for her fans. Five years after her arrival in the United States, Reri returned to Tahiti. She stayed for only a couple of days – "it’s too boring," she proclaimed, "there is nothing to do."

Tabu has a very important cultural status in Polynesia. The film is frequently revived on the islands. At showings, people reminisce about the characters in the film, villagers that the older men and women can recall. In that respect, the movie serves as a link between the Polynesians today and their ancestors shown in the film. Reportedly, screenings of the film are festive affairs, more like family reunions that conventional movie-going with banqueting and much carousing accompanying the movie. The portrait of old Polynesia shown in the movie, imagery that was idealized when the picture was shot, has replaced Tahitians actual memories of the period of the time displayed in Tabu – in effect, the movie has substituted its vision of the islands for reality.

　

QUIZ:

1. The idea of Tabu was important in the period after World War I. A well-known book was Totem and Taboo written by _________________.
2. This writer suffered from tuberculosis and wrote a famous short novel that is made into a horror film about twice a decade. He died in Samoa and is buried under a tombstone that ends with the words: Home is the sailor, home from sea/ And the hunter from the hill. Who is this writer? What is the book that he wrote that was repeatedly made into a horror film?
3. Emil Nolde, the great German painter who lived for several years in New Guinea, was a devout follower of German National Socialism until Hitler declared his paintings to be unartete or (name the word)?
4. Before making Tabu, Murnau directed City Girl, a story about a Chicago waitress who falls in love with a farmer (who has come to Chicago to sell wheat), marries him, and goes to live on his farm in ____________.
5. Murnau’s co-director on Tabu, Robert Flaherty, is most famous for his 1922 documentary Nanook of the North. What happened to Allakariallak, the Inuit man who played Nanook?
　
　

Bone Tomahawk

Bone Tomahawk (2015) only serves as a sad reminder that the most beautiful of film genres, the Western, remains dead.  Although the film presents all the classical trappings of the Western (it even has a ballad, "Four Doomed Men Rode Out," sung by a husky-voiced baritone over the closing titles), there is no money available to produce a Western per se, and so Bone Tomahawk was probably pitched as gross-out horror film.  The horror elements don't necessary falsify the nobility of the film's Western structure, but they result in some mighty odd, and implausible, plot contortions.

The initial problem that the film must solve is that of establishing an effectively nasty and remorseless adversary.  In the fifties, and even up to about 1970, renegade Indians could play the role that zombies now occupy in action films -- that is, the robotic, savage killers prone to rape and torture their victims (zombies just eat your brains).  Movies like the great Ulzana's Raid or The Searchers posited the Indians on the warpath as irredeemably brutal, an "Other" with which we can't co-exist and that must be exterminated.  (Of course, The Searchers, a film that is really a portrait of an archetypal figure in Western mythology, the Indian-hater, is much more complex than this sketch -- but the film's narrative is founded in an almost Old Testament vision of the Indian enemy as a figure beyond any moral redemption.)  Political correctness does not permit the portrayal of Indians in this way any longer.  Accordingly, Bone Tomahawk must posit a tribe of "troglodytes", mud-caked savages living in a sort of primal horde in a cave high above a remote desert valley.  The "troglodytes" are said to non-Indian.  Indeed, Bone Tomahawk recruits to its estimable cast a famous and authentic TV Indian (the handsome Zahn McClarnen who played Hanzee Dent in the second season of Tv's Fargo).  This actor has only one function in the movie:  he establishes that whatever the "troglodytes" are, they aren't Native Americans.  But, of course, this is completely absurd -- the "troglodytes", although caked in eerie white mud, use bows and arrows, howl like wolves to signal one another, and slaughter their prey with "bone tomahawks".  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.  Therefore, the film's machinations designed to exempt it from claims of racism are both ineffective and risible -- it suffices to say that the bad guys in Bone Tomahawk are some kind of Indians. 

For reasons that are unclear, "troglodytes" (previously ensconced more or less harmlessly in their remote valley), have left the reservation and abducted three people from the town of Bright Hope.  Bright Hope is purely notional village -- it has no economic or industrial basis, a little idyllic village set down in the middle of a completely empty wilderness.  (This is not inconsistent with classic Westerns -- in The Searchers, the pioneers live in Monument Valley and seem to be farmers and ranchers:  but, of course, there is no way to farm or ranch in Monument Valley).  The town's sheriff played by Kurt Russell leads a posse of three other men in pursuit of the savages.  This aspect of the film is played out in a way that will be reassuringly familiar to fans of the Western -- Russell has a school-marmish (but sexually frisky) wife and is accompanied by the "back-up Sheriff", an loyal old man in the Walter Brennan mold.  One of the posse members is an Indian killer who has notched his belt 116 times, but otherwise the very picture of a dude-ish southern gentlemen.  The fourth member of the posse is the husband of the woman who has been snatched by the savages, his participation in the venture hampered by the fact that he has a badly broken leg and, after their horses are stolen, literally has to crawl through the desert in his quest for the missing woman.  The men's trek across the deserts and mountains is pleasantly filmed and involves many vistas of men on horseback traversing empty wastelands.  There are some encounters with other desert dwellers, including a pointless shooting of two Mexicans described as the "definition of Manifest Destiny" and suitably criticized by the film.  Ultimately, the heroes reach the narrow and hideous defile where the savages live and there is a protracted and very gory last act involving lots of slaughter on all sides.  

Although Bone Tomahawk invokes many films from Hitchcock's Rear Window to Monte Hellman's minimalist Westerns, the movie that seems to be the greatest influence on the film is the Coen brothers' 2010 version of True Grit.  Like that film, Bone Tomahawk features florid Victorian dialogue and one of the Coen boys' best supporting actors, the redoubtable Fred Melamed, playing the saloon-keeper of the Learned Goat.  The film is the first picture directed by S. Craig Zahler and, if truth is told, the film making is not particularly polished.  Zahler has a tendency to edit away from the action to extreme long shots.  The long shots are often not particularly expressive and, indeed, sometimes produce the feeling that we are looking at a master shot because something went wrong with close-ups.  (This is probably the case -- the movie with its elaborate set-pieces was shot in the Mojave desert in only 28 days.)  The actors are uniformly excellent -- Richard Jenkins plays the Walter Brennan role and Patrick Wilson, recently featured on the second season of another Coen brothers' project, Fargo, is the aggrieved and crippled husband.  Matthew Fox plays the Indian-hater.  The scenes involving violence are all unexpected and effectively staged -- our heroes get repeatedly wounded and are, more or less, effortlessly mangled by the bad guys.  The film's rhythms are all wrong and a lot of the dialogue, although cleverly written, doesn't ring true.  There is lots of over-the-top gore.  And every cliché in the film and TV industry is on display -- when an African-American kid goes into a barn at night, we know what to expect.  It's the old Star Trek rule -- always teleport down to the alien planet with one Black guy in the crew so that someone can be killed without having to harm a major actor with a continuing role in the show.  Bone Tomahawk is pretty good and it's always pleasant to see a Western, but it's not as good as it should be. 

Goodbye CP

Kazuo Hara's 1972 documentary Goodbye CP is hard to watch, technically ragged, and depressing on all levels.  A documentary film can expose some social injustice and  justify itself, perhaps, by suggesting means to ameliorate that injustice -- indeed, many documentaries follow this norm.  Or a documentary may simply arouse consciousness about some aspect of human existence (or scientific interest) as a matter of education.  Finally, I suppose, a documentary can be a kind of freak show -- near the end of Hara's film, the protagonist, Yokota Hiroshi, a man severely disabled by cerebral palsy, is sprawled in the center of a public square, bawling out a poem that he has written.  The man is afflicted by clonic-tonic spasms and writhes horribly, his face contorted into a series of grotesque grimaces.  It's not clear that anyone can understand his distorted voice -- the film's subtitles benefit non-Japanese speakers unfairly, I think; my suspicion is that most of what Hiroshi bellows would be incomprehensible to those around him.  Finally, someone cries out that this is a "freak show" and should be stopped and the camera, for the first time in a film resolutely focused on the grimy pavement, tilts up to survey the skyscrapers and the sun before the frame freezes.  Although condemning both Hiroshi's poetry reading and the movie as a freak show is simplistic, there is some merit to the anonymous interlocutor's cry.  How are we supposed to react to the imagery in this film?  Cerebral palsy is a not a social injustice and, probably, isn't a legitimate subject for intense biological scrutiny (something the film doesn't provide in any event) unless you are a nurse or doctor or victim of this condition.  Hara's film is designed to make us look, and look closely, at something to which we would normally avert our eyes -- but does this justify this harrowing and invasive film? 

Yokota Hiroshi is a man who walks on his bent knees -- he looks a bit like a maimed frog as he creeps across the pavement in Tokyo.  In the beginning, the film shows him hurtling himself across a cross-walk, trying to get off the road before the traffic hits him.  Hiroshi moves with surprising speed but it is exceptionally painful to watch him  repeatedly smashing his knees against the hard concrete, his glasses falling off his face, as he drags himself forward with the strength of his upper body.  At first, Hiroshi seems to invite the viewers' admiration for the feat, but, of course, we wonder -- why isn't he using a wheelchair?  Isn't the spectacle intended to appall us?  Later, a group of five or six men with CP set up a donation box and solicit small contributions to something they call the "Green Lawn" -- the soundtrack consists of interviews explaining why the onlookers donated money, most of them sending their terrified toddlers up to the donation box to drop in paper money.  The reasons people donate money are mostly banal and related to a mixture of fear and pity.  A lengthy series of interviews, filmed in extreme close-up, consists of the badly disabled men telling the camera about their first sexual encounters -- of course, this is painful material, but it is hard to measure the men's reactions because their faces are continuously twisting into masklike grimaces.  The camera is so close that we can sense the spittle oozing from their lips spraying onto the lens.  At a meeting of the Green Lawn, Hiroshi's wife, Yoshiko, also terribly twisted and mutilated by CP, berates the protagonist for walking on his knees, something that she thinks is grotesque.  Yoshiko accuses Hara, the film maker of encouraging undignified and freakish behavior.  This leads to full-scale fight in which Hiroshi and Yoshiko flail away at one another -- one of them starts bleeding.  Of course, their two children, both toddlers, are alternately horrified and delighted by their parent's violent antics.  Hiroshi rides the subway -- how he gets on and off is terrifying to see.  One of the men with CP is married and his wife, also afflicted, has a normal baby.  The man and his wife carry the baby through heavy traffic, staggering so much that we are afraid that they will drop the baby on the road -- it seems astounding that they can even walk, let alone carry the child successfully.  The man says that he is very happy that the baby seems normal, something that he admits is shameful because he has been taught to embrace his CP.  A man carries Hiroshi on his shoulders to a poetry reading.  Everyone ignores Hiroshi.  They go to another public square where Hiroshi recites his poem to a large crowd of gawkers but someone, possibly a policeman, stops the performance.  On a lonely bridge in an ugly industrial district, Hiroshi shows us his body, squatting naked on his battered knees in the middle of the road.  Hiroshi, now clothed, says that he participated in the film to show what he could do, to demonstrate his prowess in getting around, but, now, he admits that he can do nothing on his own -- during the last three minutes of the film, he wriggles around on the pavement like a worm someone has cut in two.  He seems to have lost the ability to walk on his knees, or, perhaps, because of his wife's objections, he will not move in that way.  He cries out that he is completely helpless and on that note the film ends.

Goodbye CP is shot in grainy black-and-white, probably 8 millimeter blown up to a larger format.  The soundtrack is not synchronized -- or, at least, mostly non-synchronized.  The synchronized parts of the sound track are signaled by someone stabbing a battered-looking microphone into the faces of the people appearing in the screen.  The picture is resolutely unpicturesque, ugly, grimy, poorly cut -- it's like punk rock film making.  And the movie refuses to provide the viewer with any solace.  Most films of this sort would celebrate the heroism of the victim of CP battling against terrible and painful affliction -- this film does the opposite:  Hiroshi seems to become more frail and more disabled as the movie progresses and, at the end, proclaims that he is completely helpless.  Hiroshi is an unlikely hero in any event -- a wife-beater and narcissist who seems obsessed with reciting poetry to people who aren't interested in hearing his work and who are probably unable to understand his speech in any event.  The film revels in suffering with no indication that this suffering ennobles anyone -- the bystanders simply avert their eyes and the people suffering aren't magically cured, don't get better, and aren't reconciled to their plight.  Furthermore, the Hiroshi's poems suggest a horrifying zero-sum view of the world, the same view that, I think, subconsciously appalls those who see him:  he cries out that because the able-bodied have legs he has no legs.  In other words, CP is an affliction that is visited on a sacrificial victim, Hiroshi, so that he others will not have to suffer from this curse.  This notion is primitive and awful, but, I think, explains the sense of almost religious awe and obscenity that we experience in watching Hiroshi and the members of the Green Lawn.  Is CP somehow contagious?  Does he have the disease so that I won't have to suffer from it?  Ultimately, Goodbye CP suggests a couple antecedents.  The first is a film about lepers made in Iran in the early 1960's, The House is Black (Forough Farrokhzad) -- although this film is famous in Europe and the Middle East and very harrowing, it is ultimately, perhaps, a surrealistic picture:  the horrors shown are depicted in intense chiaroscuro and there is a certain grim poetry in the picture.  The other antecedent to Goodbye CP are certain works by Beckett, prose and plays in which the characters are systematically stripped of everything and end as mutilated lumps of flesh.  Beckett, of course, is making a metaphorical point about despair and the human condition.  There is nothing metaphorical about Goodbye CP.