Uomini Contro (1970) is a singularly uncompromising war picture directed by the great Italian film maker Francesco Rosi. In the third film in his oeuvre released in 1971, Salvatore Giuliani, Rosi demonstrated his gift for staging scenes involving realistic and appalling violence -- the attack on the May Day celebration in the high mountains of Sicily is a highlight in that film and, indeed, so dramatic that it threatens to overwhelm the legal and procedural concerns of the rest of the movie. Uomini Contro released in this country as Many Wars Ago is a documentary-like essay on the effects of protracted trench warfare on its combatants. For many people, the film has proved to be essentially unwatchable -- the picture documents a nightmarish stalemate in which a psychotic general continually orders his men into suicidal attacks on entrenched enemy machine guns. Two officers leading the Italian soldiers become increasingly disenchanted with the General's homicidal strategy -- each of the two protagonists rebels and ends up dying for his convictions. Accordingly, the movie is an unrelenting portrait of horrific injustice and cruelty and, at its end, those who have had the temerity to oppose this brutal system are executed -- the film is ideologically pure: it represents warfare as entirely futile, tactically pointless, and absurd. But the film's great cruelty is that those who speak out about this futility are, themselves, destroyed and the war, presumably, simply continues unabated. After about 15 minutes, the viewer longs for the soldiers to rise up and kill their officers and this desire only increases throughout the rest of the picture. But all efforts at rebellion are ruthlessly quashed and so the hapless audience is left enraged at the injustice portrayed in the film.
The movie concerns warfare in the Asiago altiplano, a battle for a place called Monte Fiore. (Rosi's father was a photographer who covered the Asiago front and he took a photograph that triggered the director's interest in the subject -- the picture showed enlisted men handcuffed to trees in No-Man's-Land, a form of execution by enemy bullet used to crush dissent in the ranks.) General Leone, played by Alain Cuny, and his men have been driven off Monte Fiore -- they mount a futile counterattack with cavalry against machine guns and the field ends up strewn with dead men and dying, mangled horses. At one point, a scout suspects an enemy ambush and cries out that the retreating column should stop. Leone is appalled that a scout has issued an order and requires that the man be shot. Ottolenghi, the commanding officer objects that the scout did nothing wrong. Nonsense, General Leone declares, the man must be shot, even if innocent, to demonstrate military discipline. (Ottolenghi uses a subterfuge to save the man.) The Italians retreat into a huge network of trenches from which they launch repeated attacks -- all of them totally unsuccessful. When one group of soldiers balks at a pointless assault, Leone has the brigade decimated -- shooting a group of wailing men tied to tall posts: as is characteristic for this movie, one of the men escapes and flees a long distance -- we are rooting for him to get away -- but he is shot down, wounded, and, then, dragged back to be tied up to his post again, and, although dying from a gunshot wound, shot by the firing squad. Ottolenghi, a socialist, suggests that his, all farm laborers, men should rebel. For this comment, he sent on a suicide mission to cut through barbed wire and killed. Leone outfits a platoon of soldiers in medieval armor and sends them into the fray -- the machine bullets perforate the men's ridiculous looking armor (they are like animate garbage cans) with ease and they are all killed in about 15 seconds. Leone, a silver-haired man of great personal valor, suggests that his soldiers attack carrying knives in their teeth to gut the Austrians in hand-to-hand combat. But, of course, no one can get within two-hundred yards of the Austrian machine-gun emplacements. Finally, artillery is hauled through the Alpine mud up to the front and a huge cannonade ensues. But the gunners have the range wrong and rain shells down on the Italian troops. Ordered to attack, the troops refuse to leave their shelters -- after all, they are being shelled by their own artillery -- and Leone's lieutenants order yet another decimation of the troops: one out of every ten men is dragged into the shellfire and gunned down by a firing squad. This is too much for Ottolenghi's successor. He promotes an uprising that fails and is executed in a monumental quarry -- a vast stone-walled pit in the side of the mountain that seems to represent the implacable cruelty of the war and its leaders. The movie is a bit like Kubrick's Paths of Glory but without that films' somewhat forced humanism -- Paths of Glory ultimately was a forensic movie, a document of a trial about justice and injustice in war-time. In this film, there are no real trials. Military tribunals sentence men to death in a hospital for self-inflicted wounds, an assembly line of murder that results in a conviction every thirty seconds. On the battlefield, the situation is so terrible that, at one point, the Austrian machine-gunners stop firing and shout "Italian soldiers don't make us kill you any more. We've had enough. Go back to your trenches." The attackers return to their squalid pits where many of them are executed for treason. In Renoir's The Grand Illusion, two soldiers escape across the Swiss border, wading through deep snow -- a German soldier aims his gun at them, draws a bead, but, then, refuses to fire since he thinks it pointless to kill fellow human beings who are merely escaping an intolerable plight. In this film, a man flees across the snowy plateau, running for the Austrian lines crying out "Kamerad! Kamerad!" He almost makes it, but at the last minute an Italian sniper, one of his comrades, guns him down. This is a radical, disturbing film, more like the works Peter Watkins (for instance, The Battle of Culloden) than any of the other movies contemporary to it.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Star Trek Beyond
Star Trek Beyond (2016) is a film of staggering incompetence. If it were a bridge, its span would pitch cars and trucks into the abyss. If it were a house, the roof would leak and the toilets wouldn't flush and there would be cracks in its basement foundation. Perhaps, we shouldn't be too surprised: competency, after all, is a rare thing. One has only to consider the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be reminded of that fact. The film's ineptitude is signaled by its grammatically incoherent title: beyond what?
Star Trek Beyond begins with a couple of promising jokes. James Tiberius Kirk is making a pitch to a crowd of standard-issue iguana-faced villains. They abuse him verbally but there is a strange,unsettling pitch of hysteria in their voices. Suddenly, the monsters attack him en masse and, only then, do we discover that the creatures, far from being burly man-sized brutes, are about the scale of chickens -- they bite at Captain Kirk's ankles and cling to his shoulders. It's a good disorienting gag, but, as the film progresses, the movie is so badly stitched together that you begin to wonder if the joke was intentional -- maybe, the director, Jason Lin, is so bad that he didn't know how to stage the opening scene and intended that we understand at the outset that the iguana heads were the size of squirrels. There a cynical voice-over captain's log that promises some Guardians of the Galaxy-style irreverence, but it all immediately comes to naught. Once the plot begins in earnest, the jokes, more or less, evaporate and we are left with a gargantuan parade of special effects that manage to be both incoherent, deafeningly loud, and tedious all at the same time. The director doesn't have any idea how to put one image next to another to tell a story -- he has no sense of space or location or, even, physical plausibility. (This may result from constructing a movie that other than the actors probably has no tangible physical reality of any sort -- it's all people gesticulating in front of green screens.) Halfway through the movie, the shipwrecked crew of the Enterprise is playing cat and mouse with another group of lizard-faced bad guys. We see our heroes sheltering in a sort of dark niche -- much of the film is shot in murky darkness, the blue-green gloom that is the last refuge of scoundrels in a special effects movie. Suddenly, the movie cuts to an exterior that is completely disorienting -- the camera, then, engages in a kind of pointless spiraling motion around a toadstool-like whatchamagig to come to rest on some reptilian soldiers walking around in the gloom. We have absolutely no sense as to where our protagonists are located in the image -- the camera motion, although showy is completely uncommunicative, and there is no suspense generated by the images because we don't know if the bad guys and our heroes are close to one another or hundreds of yards apart. Later, Captain Kirk (I think -- it's baffling that the main male actors all look exactly alike) mounts a motorcycle inexplicably discovered in deep space and rides it around, using magic powers provided to him by a female alien to clone himself into a half dozen roaring, buzzing motorcycles. It's kind of like Steve McQueen's ride in The Great Escape except on steroids. But there are a few problems: first, the whole surface of the planet looks like C. D. Friedrich's painting of the Wreck of the Hoffnung, that is, this planet is comprised of vertical shards of rock like the ice field crushing the ship in the painting -- there's no flat space over which anyone could possibly ride a motorcycle although, suddenly, wheel-friendly terraces magically appear. And, it's completely unclear how James Kirk (if that's who it is) has acquired the ability to clone himself. There are some impressive special effects, probably peaking about a half hour into the picture when the bad guys unleash a swarm of small tack-shaped space-ships, millions of them it seems that swirl through space like an immense cloud of bats -- the millions of tiny, sharp-edged space vehicles overwhelm the Enterprise and, in an intensely confusing and poorly designed sequence, the iconic space cruiser seems to be ripped into pieces before it collapse into the stony pinnacles of the planet. There's an artificial world that consists of dizzying moebius strip-like ribbons of earth and steel covered with skyscrapers, some of these twisting spans bearing lakes and parks and rivers of glittering water -- the place looks like an Escher engraving gone mad and it's a wonderful effect. But the film doesn't explain exactly how the gravitational fields around these cantilevered moebius strips keep the people walking around upside down from falling off. This failing is particularly grievous because the movie's idiotic climax involves hand to hand combat on one of the prominences protruding from these dizzying spans and when Kirk seems to fall, instead he is held aloft by mysterious gravitational (or should I say antigravitational) forces. The movie simply improvises exceptions to the laws of physics as it requires them. Star Trek Beyond has about a half-hour worth of mind-boggling special effects -- but this spectacle simply goes to show us how far technology has advanced beyond the narrative competence of these film makers.
Star
Star Trek Beyond begins with a couple of promising jokes. James Tiberius Kirk is making a pitch to a crowd of standard-issue iguana-faced villains. They abuse him verbally but there is a strange,unsettling pitch of hysteria in their voices. Suddenly, the monsters attack him en masse and, only then, do we discover that the creatures, far from being burly man-sized brutes, are about the scale of chickens -- they bite at Captain Kirk's ankles and cling to his shoulders. It's a good disorienting gag, but, as the film progresses, the movie is so badly stitched together that you begin to wonder if the joke was intentional -- maybe, the director, Jason Lin, is so bad that he didn't know how to stage the opening scene and intended that we understand at the outset that the iguana heads were the size of squirrels. There a cynical voice-over captain's log that promises some Guardians of the Galaxy-style irreverence, but it all immediately comes to naught. Once the plot begins in earnest, the jokes, more or less, evaporate and we are left with a gargantuan parade of special effects that manage to be both incoherent, deafeningly loud, and tedious all at the same time. The director doesn't have any idea how to put one image next to another to tell a story -- he has no sense of space or location or, even, physical plausibility. (This may result from constructing a movie that other than the actors probably has no tangible physical reality of any sort -- it's all people gesticulating in front of green screens.) Halfway through the movie, the shipwrecked crew of the Enterprise is playing cat and mouse with another group of lizard-faced bad guys. We see our heroes sheltering in a sort of dark niche -- much of the film is shot in murky darkness, the blue-green gloom that is the last refuge of scoundrels in a special effects movie. Suddenly, the movie cuts to an exterior that is completely disorienting -- the camera, then, engages in a kind of pointless spiraling motion around a toadstool-like whatchamagig to come to rest on some reptilian soldiers walking around in the gloom. We have absolutely no sense as to where our protagonists are located in the image -- the camera motion, although showy is completely uncommunicative, and there is no suspense generated by the images because we don't know if the bad guys and our heroes are close to one another or hundreds of yards apart. Later, Captain Kirk (I think -- it's baffling that the main male actors all look exactly alike) mounts a motorcycle inexplicably discovered in deep space and rides it around, using magic powers provided to him by a female alien to clone himself into a half dozen roaring, buzzing motorcycles. It's kind of like Steve McQueen's ride in The Great Escape except on steroids. But there are a few problems: first, the whole surface of the planet looks like C. D. Friedrich's painting of the Wreck of the Hoffnung, that is, this planet is comprised of vertical shards of rock like the ice field crushing the ship in the painting -- there's no flat space over which anyone could possibly ride a motorcycle although, suddenly, wheel-friendly terraces magically appear. And, it's completely unclear how James Kirk (if that's who it is) has acquired the ability to clone himself. There are some impressive special effects, probably peaking about a half hour into the picture when the bad guys unleash a swarm of small tack-shaped space-ships, millions of them it seems that swirl through space like an immense cloud of bats -- the millions of tiny, sharp-edged space vehicles overwhelm the Enterprise and, in an intensely confusing and poorly designed sequence, the iconic space cruiser seems to be ripped into pieces before it collapse into the stony pinnacles of the planet. There's an artificial world that consists of dizzying moebius strip-like ribbons of earth and steel covered with skyscrapers, some of these twisting spans bearing lakes and parks and rivers of glittering water -- the place looks like an Escher engraving gone mad and it's a wonderful effect. But the film doesn't explain exactly how the gravitational fields around these cantilevered moebius strips keep the people walking around upside down from falling off. This failing is particularly grievous because the movie's idiotic climax involves hand to hand combat on one of the prominences protruding from these dizzying spans and when Kirk seems to fall, instead he is held aloft by mysterious gravitational (or should I say antigravitational) forces. The movie simply improvises exceptions to the laws of physics as it requires them. Star Trek Beyond has about a half-hour worth of mind-boggling special effects -- but this spectacle simply goes to show us how far technology has advanced beyond the narrative competence of these film makers.
Star
The Cameraman
The Cameraman, a Buster Keaton movie made in 1928, is a classical example of a silent comedy. The movie has a simple, lucid structure that can be readily expanded to incorporate gags and comical sequences without detracting from the principal emphasis of the plot. Everything is exquisitely calculated, precisely designed, and not really very funny. Like many of Keaton's comedies, the viewer is left in awe, astounded by the comedian's grace and athleticism and his razor-sharp timing, but, also, excluded as it were from much participation in the formulaic plot -- we know what will happen before it occurs, although, as in many silent comedies, the gags are frequently far more grandiose and astonishing that we could have predicted. But the general shape of the narrative, resolutely without anything like satire or social criticism, is wholly predictable, a simple-minded, if emotionally, satisfying morality play in which the beleaguered hero in the end wins the affection of the girl notwithstanding his apparent incompetence. Keaton plays a street photographer who sells cheap tintypes for ten cents an image. He encounters a beautiful girl who works at MGM in the documentary department -- the film seems to be taking place in New York City and appears to have been shot on location. Documentary film maker are imagined to be brave and bold pioneers -- we see one of them filming a battle in World War One in the midst of huge explosions and machine gun fire. Keaton takes the girl's picture, falls in love with her, and tries to impress her by becoming a documentary fiml maker himself. His initial efforts are complete failures and he can't go in or out of the door of the MGM offices without shattering the window with his tripod -- it's an ongoing gag that's not funny at all, but rather demonstrative of the hero's radical ineptitude. The girl gives Keaton a tip that there is a Tong War about to begin in Chinatown. He finds himself in the middle of spectacular street fighting in which the rival gangs shoot at one another with Tommy guns and big heavy WWI vintage machine guns. (Before reaching the scene of the battle, he has acquired a fantastically expressive and well-trained capuchin monkey -- one of the jokes in the film is that the monkey is far more expressive than Keaton.) Keaton's footage of the Tong War seems to be lost; he thinks he forgot to lead his camera. He is fired. His girlfriend goes for a boat ride with the hero's rival, a dapper bruiser who is literally twice Keaton's size, in a sandy harbor that looks like somewhere near LA. There is an accident and Keaton rescues the girl. The big bruiser boyfriend takes credit for saving the heroine and Keaton is left sitting alone and disconsolate in the rubbish on the ugly looking beach. Fortunately, the capuchin monkey has filmed Keaton's rescue of the heroine, the lost Tong war footage is found, and Keaton is vindicated, winning the girl in the end. As he walks down Fifth Avenue, ticker tape descends on him and it seems as if the whole city is celebrating his victory. But a quick inserted shot shows us Lucky Lindbergh riding in a open convertible and, it appears, that Keaton with his lady love is simply walking in Lindbergh's triumphant procession. The movie contains some fantastically beautiful shots -- a scene in which Keaton staggers through the rain with the camera moving ahead of him seems to anticipate half of the glories of Italian neo-realist film and the Tong War is excitingly portrayed. (As one might expect, there is a strong whiff of racism about this sequence -- at one point, Keaton violates all journalistic ethics by restoring to one of the combatants a dagger so that the man can fight, and die, more spectacularly for his camera. We would have a different feeling about this scenes, I think, if it were not stereotyped Chinese battling in the streets.) Generally, films that feature monkeys alongside their lead man are in desperate straits -- in this case, the diminutive monkey, lithe and strong as Keaton himself, is a good match for the hero and the little beast is endearingly cute. Comedies of this sort are very interesting in that they were set in the present-day of the 1920's and, inadvertently, depict with great, even startling, clarity what day-to-day life was like at that time. Keaton's small furnished apartment gives us a glimpse of how people lived in the cities in the late twenties and there is a fascinating scene at something called "the Municipal Plunge," actually a public swimming pool. As is often the case in silent films and two-reelers made in the thirties, some of the gags are protracted to nightmarish and Kafkaesque effect -- in this picture, Keaton shares a tiny changing booth with a huge man and they keep getting entangled in one another's clothing: the effect is palpably stifling and claustrophobic. It is isn't funny but it is certainly disturbing.
The Loved One
The influence of Fellini and Kubrick weighs heavily on Tony Richardson's nightmare black comedy, The Loved One (1965). The film's deep focus and high contrast, clinically analytical black and white photography, a tremendous achievement by Haskell Wexler calls to mind the pitch darkness and blasts of acetylene-white light in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove -- the films share a writer: Terry Southern worked with Christopher Isherwood to adapt Evelyn Waugh's novel to the screen. Furthermore, both the Kubrick picture and Richardson's film are intensely invested in the details of the industry that they document -- there is a kind of neo-realist intensity of focus on the embalming rooms and cosmeticians' cubicles in The Loved One that is similar to the documentary imagery of SAC bombers and underground war rooms on the Kubrick movie. And, like Fellini, particularly in 8 1/2, Richardson's movie luxuriates in the grotesque, most notably in the horrific scenes involving Rod Steiger as Mr. Joyboy, a hapless embalmer hopelessly enmeshed with his vastly obese mother -- Richardson liked scenes involving jaws rending and tearing meat (there is a famous episode in his Tom Jones of that kind) and, in The Loved One, we get to see Mom Joyboy ravaging a full suckling pig. Mom Joyboy's meal, filmed in Soviet-style montage with canted angles, is overdone and not very funny -- on the other hand, that scene follows a hilarious monologue by the wet-eyed Steiger in which he applies his best method-acting technique to recounting a dream in which boiled lobsters devoured his mother. The contrast between Steiger's laugh-out-loud monologue and the grotesque and unfunny eating montage epitomizes the whole film -- about half of it is exceedingly funny and brilliantly realized; the other half is over-emphatic, hysterical, like a laugh-track gone berserk.
The Loved One was a big prestigious production and has a cast swarming with bizarre cameos -- Liberace plays a dapper, even, sinister, casket salesman: you expect him to be outrageous but, to the contrary, his performance is effectively understated. Jonathon Winter plays the Peter Sellers double-part in the film, acting both the role of a corrupt, if visionary, preacher and cemetery entrepreneur and his brother, a smarmy conniving Hollywood agent turned pet cemetery proprietor. Winters is funny in both roles, although the apocalyptic imagery associated with the corrupt evangelist is ultimately overdone to the point of absurdity: when the maniacal, ranting Reverend attempts to rape, the mortuary cosmetician, Aimee Thanatogenos, stained glass imagery on the walls of the cemetery chapel come to life as vivid, animated sex scenes and the Blessed Reverend, who has sponsored an orgy for military men in his casket showroom, hovers over the infernal landscape of Los Angeles, all throbbing freeways and dusty vacant lots, in a sinister black helicopter. Paul Williams, whose presence in films was always utterly bizarre and inexplicably weird, appears as a boy genius instrumental in the Reverend's idea of blasting "stiffs" into orbit, thereby, clearing out the tenants of his vast and gaudy memorial park so that it can be converted into a senior citizen's retirement and assisted living compound. Williams is particularly creepy because of his intensity and the fact that he seems to be no known gender and no particular age -- he is either a wizened boy-child or an inexplicably infantile old woman. John Gielgud plays the part of an expatriate English gentleman, apparently ripely homosexual, employed as a set decorator in the film industry. His firing by the blandly indifferent and boyish Roddy McDowell, acting the role of a studio executive, causes him to commit suicide and his obsequies sets in motion the plot. Robert Morse is the film's protagonist, the dead set designer's nephew, and a rival with the foppish embalmer, Mr. Joyboy, for the love of the sepulchral mortuary attendant, Aimee Thanatogenos, Tab Hunter appears briefly as a cemetery tour guide and grave-plot salesman. The film begins with "America the Beautiful" sung as an ironic counterpoint to planes landing at LAX, clearly a reference to the beginning of Kubrick's Strangelove showing the SAC bombers copulating in mid-air like immense ominous dragonflies, and, with due symmetry, not otherwise observed in this film, ends with Morse returning to England from the same airport, sadder, it seems, but not wiser. I saw this film on television in the late sixties -- the movie has some images that once seen will stick with the viewer for the rest of his or her life: at least this has been the case with me. The falls of Xanadu, a twinkling grove in the Forest Lawn-like celebrity cemetery glistens in the moonlight as Morse's character recites Keats -- "I have been half in love with easeful death"; the cynical owner of a pet cemetery spears small furry dogs with a kind of lance and casts the rigor-mortified beasts into a pet crematorium; Aimee Thanatogenos lives in condemned house tipped over the edge of desert ravine -- it's a slide area and her home is inexorably slipping into the abyss and, in the final shot in that sequence, we see her swinging on her porch, pumping her legs, to fly far out over the canyon as the home, supported by a few spindly beams groans and trembles underneath. Mr. Joyboy sends messages to Miss Thanatogenos by the expressions he sculpts into the faces of the deceased "loved ones" -- we see John Gielgud smiling demonically and another corpse with a hang-dog expression of utter dejection expressing the embalmer's sorrow at her rebuffing his advances. A subplot, derived from Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts involving a burly alcoholic playing the part of a faux Hindu guru offering advise to the lovelorn is less effective simply because those themes were managed much powerfully by West than in the film. The picture is a vast, dispiriting spectacle, a nihilistic epic, and, despite its innumerable flaw well worth seeing.
The Loved One was a big prestigious production and has a cast swarming with bizarre cameos -- Liberace plays a dapper, even, sinister, casket salesman: you expect him to be outrageous but, to the contrary, his performance is effectively understated. Jonathon Winter plays the Peter Sellers double-part in the film, acting both the role of a corrupt, if visionary, preacher and cemetery entrepreneur and his brother, a smarmy conniving Hollywood agent turned pet cemetery proprietor. Winters is funny in both roles, although the apocalyptic imagery associated with the corrupt evangelist is ultimately overdone to the point of absurdity: when the maniacal, ranting Reverend attempts to rape, the mortuary cosmetician, Aimee Thanatogenos, stained glass imagery on the walls of the cemetery chapel come to life as vivid, animated sex scenes and the Blessed Reverend, who has sponsored an orgy for military men in his casket showroom, hovers over the infernal landscape of Los Angeles, all throbbing freeways and dusty vacant lots, in a sinister black helicopter. Paul Williams, whose presence in films was always utterly bizarre and inexplicably weird, appears as a boy genius instrumental in the Reverend's idea of blasting "stiffs" into orbit, thereby, clearing out the tenants of his vast and gaudy memorial park so that it can be converted into a senior citizen's retirement and assisted living compound. Williams is particularly creepy because of his intensity and the fact that he seems to be no known gender and no particular age -- he is either a wizened boy-child or an inexplicably infantile old woman. John Gielgud plays the part of an expatriate English gentleman, apparently ripely homosexual, employed as a set decorator in the film industry. His firing by the blandly indifferent and boyish Roddy McDowell, acting the role of a studio executive, causes him to commit suicide and his obsequies sets in motion the plot. Robert Morse is the film's protagonist, the dead set designer's nephew, and a rival with the foppish embalmer, Mr. Joyboy, for the love of the sepulchral mortuary attendant, Aimee Thanatogenos, Tab Hunter appears briefly as a cemetery tour guide and grave-plot salesman. The film begins with "America the Beautiful" sung as an ironic counterpoint to planes landing at LAX, clearly a reference to the beginning of Kubrick's Strangelove showing the SAC bombers copulating in mid-air like immense ominous dragonflies, and, with due symmetry, not otherwise observed in this film, ends with Morse returning to England from the same airport, sadder, it seems, but not wiser. I saw this film on television in the late sixties -- the movie has some images that once seen will stick with the viewer for the rest of his or her life: at least this has been the case with me. The falls of Xanadu, a twinkling grove in the Forest Lawn-like celebrity cemetery glistens in the moonlight as Morse's character recites Keats -- "I have been half in love with easeful death"; the cynical owner of a pet cemetery spears small furry dogs with a kind of lance and casts the rigor-mortified beasts into a pet crematorium; Aimee Thanatogenos lives in condemned house tipped over the edge of desert ravine -- it's a slide area and her home is inexorably slipping into the abyss and, in the final shot in that sequence, we see her swinging on her porch, pumping her legs, to fly far out over the canyon as the home, supported by a few spindly beams groans and trembles underneath. Mr. Joyboy sends messages to Miss Thanatogenos by the expressions he sculpts into the faces of the deceased "loved ones" -- we see John Gielgud smiling demonically and another corpse with a hang-dog expression of utter dejection expressing the embalmer's sorrow at her rebuffing his advances. A subplot, derived from Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts involving a burly alcoholic playing the part of a faux Hindu guru offering advise to the lovelorn is less effective simply because those themes were managed much powerfully by West than in the film. The picture is a vast, dispiriting spectacle, a nihilistic epic, and, despite its innumerable flaw well worth seeing.
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Film Essay -- Cemetery of Splendor
The Cemetery of Splendor and Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Since no one in the West knows how to properly pronounce his name, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, answers to "Joe." The Thai director was born in 1970 in a provincial city in Thailand. He is ethnically Chinese. Both of his parents are medical doctors and were employed by the local hospital in Khon Khaen, the town where he was raised.
Weerasethakul was educated at the university in his home town and, then, at the Art Insitute in Chicago. He studied film and, beginning in 1993, directed lyrical and poetic short subjects. Weerashakul’s first feature-length film, Mysterious Object at Noon, an exercise in surrealism was completed in 1999. Mysterious Object at Noon is not fiction – rather, it is an example of a surrealist game, "Exquisite Corpse." In "Exquisite Corpse", participants in the game construct sentences or images in fragments that are, then, combined into a finished artifact. The name of the game comes from one of the first sentences constructed, grammatical element by element: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine." The film is a kind of road movie: the director travels throughout Thailand encouraging people that he meets to add to the narrative that he is constructing.
Weerasethakul’s first narrative film is Blissfully Yours (2002). The movie involves a young man suffering from a mysterious rash over his upper body. He is involved with two women and has sex with them. Weerasthakul is homosexual and the film features male full frontal nudity controversial in Thailand.
Working with another director and performance artist, Weerasthakul created a spoof on popular Thailand martial arts films, The Adventure of Iron Pussy – this is a film of the genre popularized by John Waters, a campy appropriation of a trash-culture. Weerasethakul said that he enjoyed making the 2003 picture but that he didn’t particularly enjoy watching it.
In 2004, Weerasthakul directed Tropical Malady, an enigmatic two-part film that seems to equate homosexuality with vampirism. This was followed by 2005's Syndromes and a Century, a movie paying tribute to Weerasethakul’s parents and their relationship – this film is also divided into two parts that don’t really match one another. (This film was commissioned by the opera director, Peter Sellars, and the government of Austria as part of the New Crowned Hope celebration of Mozart’s operas composed in Vienna and Salzburg.) Weerasethakul’s Uncle Bonmee who can recall Past Lives (2010) was the director’s breakthrough movie with international audiences – the film was shown in art cinemas around the world and highly regarded. The movie involves an old man who can recall, so he says his past lives. The picture features some very primitive, if frightening special effects – there is a large shadow monster, for instance, with glowing ruby red eyes. Mekong Hotel (2012) is frankly experimental – the picture shows Pob ghosts eating offal in a deserted hotel overlooking the Mekong river. The background is bucolic, even, idyllic – green jungle with the Mekong river flowing through the landscape. There is much discussion of various kinds of Thai ghosts and vampires.
Cemetery of Splendor was made in 2015.
It is important to understand that Weerasthakul is an important "installation" artist. He has made many short films for installations that he has designed for various museums. This is the kind of art you encounter at the Walker Art Center – a darkened room, some artifacts, colored lights, a video monitor showing enigmatic images. Much of Weerasethakul’s art is designed for consumption in this kind of setting. In this respect, Weerasethakul’s films must be considered in light of the primarily non-narrative esthetic implicated in museum installations of this kind. (In Cemetery of Splendor, the impromptu hospital housing the somnambulant soldiers becomes a kind of installation art – the beds with their adjacent transfusion equipment and the C-Pap masked soldiers are bathed in light that modulates through the spectrum; this light also tints vertical stanchions between the beds, the clear plastic in those enigmatic forms also ascending and descending through the spectrum. In my view, the plastic rods suffused with colorful light are dream-allusions to the IV stanchions that Weerasethakul saw in the hospital where his parents worked.)
Weerasethakul’s films, therefore, sometimes present this conundrum – what is the finished work of art? Is it the movie? Or is it the installation setting in which his movies are often presented? Weerasethakul’s films are screened as self-sufficient, self-standing works of art – but, in fact, in many instances, his movies don’t stand alone; rather, they are part of larger, more complex exhibitions that may include other kinds of art. An example is the so-called Primitive project shown in 2011 at the New Museum in New York City. The centerpiece of Primitive is the film Uncle Bonmee who can recall Past Lives. However, the film is only one element of a larger constellation of artworks including collaborations with other Thai artists, a number of short videos, including The Phantoms of Nabua. Nabua is a town in the Isaan region of Thailand where the Communists clashed with local peasants, attacking villages and driving all military-age men into the jungles. A number of atrocities were committed in the area between 1965 and the mid-seventies. The installation consists of a number of screens on which video images are projected. Some of the films recreate a Thai legend of a widow who snatches away men who enter her enchanted forest. (Nabua is in the extreme northeast of Thailand, bordering on the Mekong River.) The Phantoms of Nabua depict local boys playing soccer with a flaming soccer ball. In other videos, we see local kids building a flying saucer as a kind of hang-out and refuge from the adults in the village. The installation’s theme is how people cope with historical trauma, an issue allied to The Cemetery of Splendor. Commissioned by Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the installation is related to research that Weerasethakul conducted in support of Uncle Bonmee.
Production
The Cemetery of Splendor was written in city-Thai and, then, translated into the Isaan dialect spoken in Khon Kaen where the film was made. According to Weerasethakul, an audience in Bangkok would require subtitles and not be able to understand the words spoken by the performers in the film. The "making of" featurette accompanying the film shows Weerasethakul and his leading lady, with another writer, laboriously translating each line of the script into the Isaan version of the Thail language.
The movie was shot in the provincial capital of Khon Kaen, a large city 450 kilometers from Bangkok in the geographical center of Thailand. This is Weerasethakul’s home town, the place where he was raised, and attended college. The city is notable for a nine-story tall Stupa containing relics of Lord Buddha.
Buddhism in Thailand
Around 250 BC, the great Indian ruler, Ashoka, dispatched Buddhist missionaries to the east and west. The embassy to the Greeks failed. But the missionaries sent to Southeast Asia were successful and Buddhism spread from its place of origin, India, into Burma, China, and Ceylon. Where Thailand is now located, three different groups of tribal people lived – the Laos, Thais, and Khmer. These people were largely rural and worshiped local spirits. Although there was an overlay of Brahmanical Hinduism in this part of southeast Asia, the peasants believed that all events were controlled by the influence of myriad spirits concealed in nature. In each house, an ancestral spirit was venerated. Every grove, field, and river was thought to contain spirits call phii that had to be propitiated if the crops were to grow, livestock and women remain fertile, and disease be averted. Phii could be both beneficial or malign.
Buddhism in the Theravada form became the state religion in the area that is now Thailand late – around the 12th and 13th centuries. Elites ruling in urban centers proclaimed themselves to be Buddhist and established large monasteries. In the country, monastic Buddhism was superimposed over pre-existing animist or spiritist practices.
Every Thai male is expected to serve some time in a Buddhist monastery. Young men typically enter the monasteries during the rainy season (July to October) when agricultural work as impractical. Most Thai men spent about 3 months in the monastery, learning the Pali canon, and practicing chants and meditation. Buddhist monasteries in rural Thailand are supported by the local farming communities – monks who have taken life-long vows are supported by their families or the communities from which they hail. Since menstruation was thought to be ritually impure, women were not active in the Buddhist Sangha (community) until after menopause. Mothers are supposed to encourage their sons to become monks and a woman whose boy goes to the monastery is thought to accrue much karmic favor. Buddhist monasteries for Thai men are flexible about their membership – it is not rare for a householder to spend several months every couple years in the monastery renewing his vows as it were. As is the case throughout the world, the number of full-time monks in Thailand, once as many as one in ten men, has radically decreased.
Thai Buddhist monasteries are thought to be channels through which divine wisdom and grace flow into the world. The monks are called upon to perform ceremonies, chanting for rain, blessing crops, praying for the longevity of the sick and aged, and manufacturing magical talismans, including love amulets. Monks are taught to act mindfully, and practice loving kindness, concern, compassion, generosity, calm, and the pursuit of the good – they are pacifist and not allowed to shed the blood of any living being.
Classical Buddhist doctrine that conditioned reality and desire are the causes of suffering are "considerably softened in popular understanding" – as per Johnson and Robinson in The Buddhist Religion. Most Thai people expect that if they lead a relatively good life, they will be awarded with a favorable rebirth – no one really expects to be reborn as a hungry ghost or animal or, even, in a Buddhist hell, a temporary state of torment that is similar to Catholic purgatory. These unfortunate destinies are possible according to the law of Karma but not likely.
There is no inconsistency between Buddhism and the pagan gods of a place. Buddhist thought holds that the world is full of gods. There are many heavens above us, filled with gods that are not immortal but that live a minimum of 36 million years. Similarly, there is a hell underfoot where sinners undergo purgatorial purification in support of a favorable rebirth. Ontologically less than (or below) that hell is the consciousness of animals. Beneath animals are innumerable ghosts, many of them hungry with greed and lust. These ghosts are tormented by the lowest order of beings, demons. Thus, Weerasethakul can show us goddesses and, indeed, have them convey important plot points to the audience without, in any way, compromising the fundamentally Buddhist analysis of existence demonstrated by the film.
Political Implications
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up."
Stephen Daedulus in James Joyce’s Ulysses
At Cannes, the publicity package for Cemetery of Splendor advised that the film was based upon real events – apparently, 40 Thai soldiers were incapacitated by a strange sleeping sickness at a remote military base.
Some critics interpret Cemetery of Splendor politically: Justin Chang writing in Variety reported from Cannes that the imagery of the sleeping soldiers correlated to a government paralyzed by internal dissension. Tony Rayns reporting from the Toronto Film Festival opined that the movie was an "angry political attack on the current turmoil in Thailand" although framed as a "lamentation."
Thailand was ruled by a series of military dictators beginning in 1932 when the King of Siam relinquished his monarchical power. Between 1932 and 1997, Thailand’s history is a series of military coups, some of them during the Vietnam war era, influenced by the CIA. In 1997, a new Constitution was framed and free Democratic elections were conducted in 2001. Although the elections were marred by street-fighting, the results were internationally certified as legitimate. But political chaos between Thailand’s five principal parties continued to the point that the military sponsored a coup d’etat in 2006. More protest ensued including violent riots in 2010, the so-called Red Shirts protest. (These riots, arising out of plan to unseat the acting, democratically elected Prime Minister resulted in grenade attacks and open civil war in some parts of Bangkok – 87 people were killed, 1500 injured, and, at least, 51 Red Shirts "disappeared," when the army and police intervened. ) In 2013, the government of Thailand proposed amnesty for political opponents of the regime. This proposal was rescinded, however, shortly after it was made with respect to the Red Shirts. More street fighting ensued and the government succumbed to yet another military coup in 2014. At present, Thailand is ruled by the military junta. Yet another draft of the country’s constitution should be unveiled this year and the acting head of the government, a military general, is proposing the re-education camps be established for political opponents of the present regime.
La Vida es Sueno
At the end of Cemetery of Splendor, we see Jenjira sitting outside the school and watching some boys play soccer in a field that has been uprooted and gouged into heaps of dirt by the military. At least, one of the soccer goals is intact, but the rest of the field is a badlands of pits and piles of muddy earth. It seems impossible that anyone could play soccer in such a place.
But what exactly are we seeing? At least three possibilities exist. First, we may be seeing schoolchildren who are engaged in the quixotic attempt to use their soccer field for play even thought it has been destroyed by the military – this is a literal reading of the image. Second, Jenjira may be dreaming – we may be seeing her dream in which playing children are juxtaposed with the ravaged field. (The film’s final shot, showing Jenjira attempting to become awake – she does this by opening her eyes as wide as possible – in fact, suggests that, perhaps, we are seeing her dream.) A third possibility is that either the children are ghosts or, in the alternative, the cratered field is a ghost – in other words, we are seeing a cratered field infested with the phantoms of boys playing soccer or, in the alternative, boys playing soccer in a future (or past) ghost landscape.
The power and beauty of Cemetery of Splendor is that we don’t make an election as to what the image means. In fact, the image can hold all of these meanings, and probably more, without any incongruity. This is because there is no reality to the meditative mind. In Buddhism, a mind awakened to the truth understands that there is no world, no time, no self, neither me nor you – rather, the only reality is the jewel in the lotus, the divine spark of pure untarnished consciousness. Thus, the world is literally a dream, something that our desires imagine and project, an illusion (like a motion picture) that we take to be true but that is ultimately wholly insubstantial. The objective of consciousness is to become fully awakened, that is to achieve Buddha-mind – an understanding that desire is suffering and that desire
can be overcome. To call the children playing in the excavated field a dream is superfluous – first, we are watching a movie and, so, everything presented is unreal, a mere image. But the world itself, to the Buddhist thinker, is only a dream – what we take to be tangible reality is as insubstantial as a dream, a fiction: the boys playing soccer are not real because nothing is real.
Weerasethakul is homosexual. The AIDS epidemic figures heavily in several of his films. Weerasethakul is also the son of parents who were doctors and says that he was literally "raised in a hospital." The idea that suffering and desire are related seems intrinsic to several of Weerasethakul’s films. This point is made vividly in Cemetery of Splendor when the sleeping soldier displays an erection – desire is what keeps us from enlightenment; the self that desires is asleep, not fully conscious, a sleeper like the young men hospitalized in the old school. Images relating to transfusions, wound-care, catheterization, and the like appear in most of Weerasethakul’s films and signify, I think, the idea that an unenlightened life is one that is enmeshed in desire and suffering.
I think it is a mistake to over-estimate the influence of doctrinal Buddhism on Weerasethakul. There is no evidence that he is particularly religious and seems to have been raised in a secular environment. Most of his formative experiences, at least with respect to art, probably occurred not in Southeast Asia but in the Windy City of Chicago. In interviews, Weerasethakul says that he began to meditate while working on the "Primitive" project – that is, during the period of time that he was directing Uncle Bonmee. Meditation, and, later, reading scientific studies of sleep, have led Weerasethakul to explore the idea that reality is a dream and that we are unable to reliably ascertain whether we are awake or asleep and dreaming. (Weerasthakul notes that sleep involves REM cycles about ninety minutes long – that is, the typical length of a narrative feature film such as the horror movie glimpsed as a trailer in the Cemetery of Splendor). Furthermore, Weerasethakul’s imagery seems more heavily influenced by "folk Buddhism", that is the array of superstitions and associated imagery that Thai peasants hold. In the film, we see a representation of a "rural Hell" – that is, a sculpture garden made by Buddhist monks for didactic purposes. (I am unsure whether this sculpture garden, shown in a ruinous state, was built for the movie or previously existed.) These "rural Hells," often, depicted sinners undergoing torment in Hell – "rural Hells" feature lurid representations of torture and mutilation involving concrete figures, often, with outsized and swollen genitalia. The notion of Hell has no real authority in philosophical Buddhism, but in folk religion, the idea has significant traction – people who sin shall be tortured in a way consistent with the nature of their sins. The "Hell" depicted in Cemetery of Splendor apparently overlies the palace of the goddesses (or, perhaps, the palace where the warring Kings resided.) No trace exists of the palaces now lost for thousands of years. It is only by reason of Jeng’s ability to enter Itt’s mind and recall his earlier incarnations ("past lives") that she can lead Jenjira on a tour of the lost palace. What we are shown of the "Hell" occupying the site is rather mild: a simulated bomb shelter that relates to the fact that the area was a war zone during the Vietnam era – the Communists in Laos, on the other side of the Mekong River, fought supporters of United States in this area – and a grim memento mori, an image of two lovers who are transformed into a skeletal version of themselves in a second concrete sculpture. The "Hell" shows us that the landscape itself is dreaming – the autumnal-looking and mournful woods dream both of a violent and an idyllic past: the war and the long-gone palace.
The word "Buddha" means "one who is fully awakened." At the end of the film, Jenjira opens her eyes as wide as possible, accessing her Buddha-nature – that is, the spark of consciousness that allows her to be fully awakened to the reality of existence. Her mutilated leg reminds us of the Four Noble Truths:
– Life is suffering.
– Suffering is caused by desire.
– Cease desire and suffering ends.
– There is a path by which desire (and, therefore, suffering) can be overcome.
Buddhists imagine existence as controlled by karma. Karma simply means "action" – and the idea is also simple: our past actions determine our present. Similarly, actions committed in an earlier existence condition the terms of our present reincarnation. Finally, as the film shows, history as the actions of many men and women itself possesses a karmic force – a history of ancient war can control the present. Thailand’s ambiguous history during the Vietnam era has a karmic force that has afflicted the present-day nation with suffering, metaphorically depicted as the combat between the ghost-princes that has sapped the energy of the modern-day Thai soldiers.
In Buddhist thought, karma is generally depicted as flowing water. Many, many actions combine to create an almost irresistable force of karmic destiny – thus, the film’s depictions of a great river, presumably the Mekong, shows how the force of hundreds of thousands of human actions combines to create energy that flows in a current in a certain direction. Buddhist practice, however, may reverse the course of karmic influence – for this reason, a person who has attained the status of an Arhat, or enlightened one, is called a "stream-winner", that is, a person who can move against the current of karma. Bad actions, and an unsatisfactory history, can impel us toward a certain karmic destiny, but we have the power within us to reverse or, at least, impede the flow of this current. These ideas are epitomized in a cinematic pendant to Cemetery of Splendor, Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel, also released in 2015. This hour long film was made at the same time that Cemetery of Splendor was produced, apparently, shot in off-hours when the cast and crew were not devoted to making the feature film – it seems to show cast and crew at the hotel where they stayed while shooting scenes by the Mekong River. The final six minutes of Mekong Hotel simply shows the vast expanse of the Mekong River, at flood stage that we are told threatens Bangkok. The river looks like a sea or a great elongated lake and seems to have no current at all – but a tree has fallen into the flood and we can see the force of the mighty river pushing that tree downstream. In the far distance, some people on jet-skis are playing on the river, superficial and futile action that has no effect on the Mekong’s inexorable flow. Since Mekong Hotel features Jenjira Pongpas, the leading lady in Cemetery of Splendor, and, in fact, references certain scenes in the feature film, it is clear that the two films are intended to overlap.
One of Cemetery of Splendor’s more enigmatic sequences shows people in a river-side park. We see them occupy different locations, switching places with one another on the shore of a great river. Buddhism holds that there is no self – "where self is, truth is not." I interpret this sequence as epitomizing this concept – we will all assume various interchangeable positions in the world of suffering or Samsara. Sometimes, we are oppressed, sometimes we are the oppressor – we love and are loved, we reject or injure one another and are, in turn, rejected and injured ourselves. Because there is nothing permanent in our souls, we play many roles all of them interchangeable with one another – and, while we are deluding ourselves with the many roles that we play, the great river of karma flows inexorably by, and through, us.
Since no one in the West knows how to properly pronounce his name, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, answers to "Joe." The Thai director was born in 1970 in a provincial city in Thailand. He is ethnically Chinese. Both of his parents are medical doctors and were employed by the local hospital in Khon Khaen, the town where he was raised.
Weerasethakul was educated at the university in his home town and, then, at the Art Insitute in Chicago. He studied film and, beginning in 1993, directed lyrical and poetic short subjects. Weerashakul’s first feature-length film, Mysterious Object at Noon, an exercise in surrealism was completed in 1999. Mysterious Object at Noon is not fiction – rather, it is an example of a surrealist game, "Exquisite Corpse." In "Exquisite Corpse", participants in the game construct sentences or images in fragments that are, then, combined into a finished artifact. The name of the game comes from one of the first sentences constructed, grammatical element by element: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine." The film is a kind of road movie: the director travels throughout Thailand encouraging people that he meets to add to the narrative that he is constructing.
Weerasethakul’s first narrative film is Blissfully Yours (2002). The movie involves a young man suffering from a mysterious rash over his upper body. He is involved with two women and has sex with them. Weerasthakul is homosexual and the film features male full frontal nudity controversial in Thailand.
Working with another director and performance artist, Weerasthakul created a spoof on popular Thailand martial arts films, The Adventure of Iron Pussy – this is a film of the genre popularized by John Waters, a campy appropriation of a trash-culture. Weerasethakul said that he enjoyed making the 2003 picture but that he didn’t particularly enjoy watching it.
In 2004, Weerasthakul directed Tropical Malady, an enigmatic two-part film that seems to equate homosexuality with vampirism. This was followed by 2005's Syndromes and a Century, a movie paying tribute to Weerasethakul’s parents and their relationship – this film is also divided into two parts that don’t really match one another. (This film was commissioned by the opera director, Peter Sellars, and the government of Austria as part of the New Crowned Hope celebration of Mozart’s operas composed in Vienna and Salzburg.) Weerasethakul’s Uncle Bonmee who can recall Past Lives (2010) was the director’s breakthrough movie with international audiences – the film was shown in art cinemas around the world and highly regarded. The movie involves an old man who can recall, so he says his past lives. The picture features some very primitive, if frightening special effects – there is a large shadow monster, for instance, with glowing ruby red eyes. Mekong Hotel (2012) is frankly experimental – the picture shows Pob ghosts eating offal in a deserted hotel overlooking the Mekong river. The background is bucolic, even, idyllic – green jungle with the Mekong river flowing through the landscape. There is much discussion of various kinds of Thai ghosts and vampires.
Cemetery of Splendor was made in 2015.
It is important to understand that Weerasthakul is an important "installation" artist. He has made many short films for installations that he has designed for various museums. This is the kind of art you encounter at the Walker Art Center – a darkened room, some artifacts, colored lights, a video monitor showing enigmatic images. Much of Weerasethakul’s art is designed for consumption in this kind of setting. In this respect, Weerasethakul’s films must be considered in light of the primarily non-narrative esthetic implicated in museum installations of this kind. (In Cemetery of Splendor, the impromptu hospital housing the somnambulant soldiers becomes a kind of installation art – the beds with their adjacent transfusion equipment and the C-Pap masked soldiers are bathed in light that modulates through the spectrum; this light also tints vertical stanchions between the beds, the clear plastic in those enigmatic forms also ascending and descending through the spectrum. In my view, the plastic rods suffused with colorful light are dream-allusions to the IV stanchions that Weerasethakul saw in the hospital where his parents worked.)
Weerasethakul’s films, therefore, sometimes present this conundrum – what is the finished work of art? Is it the movie? Or is it the installation setting in which his movies are often presented? Weerasethakul’s films are screened as self-sufficient, self-standing works of art – but, in fact, in many instances, his movies don’t stand alone; rather, they are part of larger, more complex exhibitions that may include other kinds of art. An example is the so-called Primitive project shown in 2011 at the New Museum in New York City. The centerpiece of Primitive is the film Uncle Bonmee who can recall Past Lives. However, the film is only one element of a larger constellation of artworks including collaborations with other Thai artists, a number of short videos, including The Phantoms of Nabua. Nabua is a town in the Isaan region of Thailand where the Communists clashed with local peasants, attacking villages and driving all military-age men into the jungles. A number of atrocities were committed in the area between 1965 and the mid-seventies. The installation consists of a number of screens on which video images are projected. Some of the films recreate a Thai legend of a widow who snatches away men who enter her enchanted forest. (Nabua is in the extreme northeast of Thailand, bordering on the Mekong River.) The Phantoms of Nabua depict local boys playing soccer with a flaming soccer ball. In other videos, we see local kids building a flying saucer as a kind of hang-out and refuge from the adults in the village. The installation’s theme is how people cope with historical trauma, an issue allied to The Cemetery of Splendor. Commissioned by Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the installation is related to research that Weerasethakul conducted in support of Uncle Bonmee.
Production
The Cemetery of Splendor was written in city-Thai and, then, translated into the Isaan dialect spoken in Khon Kaen where the film was made. According to Weerasethakul, an audience in Bangkok would require subtitles and not be able to understand the words spoken by the performers in the film. The "making of" featurette accompanying the film shows Weerasethakul and his leading lady, with another writer, laboriously translating each line of the script into the Isaan version of the Thail language.
The movie was shot in the provincial capital of Khon Kaen, a large city 450 kilometers from Bangkok in the geographical center of Thailand. This is Weerasethakul’s home town, the place where he was raised, and attended college. The city is notable for a nine-story tall Stupa containing relics of Lord Buddha.
Buddhism in Thailand
Around 250 BC, the great Indian ruler, Ashoka, dispatched Buddhist missionaries to the east and west. The embassy to the Greeks failed. But the missionaries sent to Southeast Asia were successful and Buddhism spread from its place of origin, India, into Burma, China, and Ceylon. Where Thailand is now located, three different groups of tribal people lived – the Laos, Thais, and Khmer. These people were largely rural and worshiped local spirits. Although there was an overlay of Brahmanical Hinduism in this part of southeast Asia, the peasants believed that all events were controlled by the influence of myriad spirits concealed in nature. In each house, an ancestral spirit was venerated. Every grove, field, and river was thought to contain spirits call phii that had to be propitiated if the crops were to grow, livestock and women remain fertile, and disease be averted. Phii could be both beneficial or malign.
Buddhism in the Theravada form became the state religion in the area that is now Thailand late – around the 12th and 13th centuries. Elites ruling in urban centers proclaimed themselves to be Buddhist and established large monasteries. In the country, monastic Buddhism was superimposed over pre-existing animist or spiritist practices.
Every Thai male is expected to serve some time in a Buddhist monastery. Young men typically enter the monasteries during the rainy season (July to October) when agricultural work as impractical. Most Thai men spent about 3 months in the monastery, learning the Pali canon, and practicing chants and meditation. Buddhist monasteries in rural Thailand are supported by the local farming communities – monks who have taken life-long vows are supported by their families or the communities from which they hail. Since menstruation was thought to be ritually impure, women were not active in the Buddhist Sangha (community) until after menopause. Mothers are supposed to encourage their sons to become monks and a woman whose boy goes to the monastery is thought to accrue much karmic favor. Buddhist monasteries for Thai men are flexible about their membership – it is not rare for a householder to spend several months every couple years in the monastery renewing his vows as it were. As is the case throughout the world, the number of full-time monks in Thailand, once as many as one in ten men, has radically decreased.
Thai Buddhist monasteries are thought to be channels through which divine wisdom and grace flow into the world. The monks are called upon to perform ceremonies, chanting for rain, blessing crops, praying for the longevity of the sick and aged, and manufacturing magical talismans, including love amulets. Monks are taught to act mindfully, and practice loving kindness, concern, compassion, generosity, calm, and the pursuit of the good – they are pacifist and not allowed to shed the blood of any living being.
Classical Buddhist doctrine that conditioned reality and desire are the causes of suffering are "considerably softened in popular understanding" – as per Johnson and Robinson in The Buddhist Religion. Most Thai people expect that if they lead a relatively good life, they will be awarded with a favorable rebirth – no one really expects to be reborn as a hungry ghost or animal or, even, in a Buddhist hell, a temporary state of torment that is similar to Catholic purgatory. These unfortunate destinies are possible according to the law of Karma but not likely.
There is no inconsistency between Buddhism and the pagan gods of a place. Buddhist thought holds that the world is full of gods. There are many heavens above us, filled with gods that are not immortal but that live a minimum of 36 million years. Similarly, there is a hell underfoot where sinners undergo purgatorial purification in support of a favorable rebirth. Ontologically less than (or below) that hell is the consciousness of animals. Beneath animals are innumerable ghosts, many of them hungry with greed and lust. These ghosts are tormented by the lowest order of beings, demons. Thus, Weerasethakul can show us goddesses and, indeed, have them convey important plot points to the audience without, in any way, compromising the fundamentally Buddhist analysis of existence demonstrated by the film.
Political Implications
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake up."
Stephen Daedulus in James Joyce’s Ulysses
At Cannes, the publicity package for Cemetery of Splendor advised that the film was based upon real events – apparently, 40 Thai soldiers were incapacitated by a strange sleeping sickness at a remote military base.
Some critics interpret Cemetery of Splendor politically: Justin Chang writing in Variety reported from Cannes that the imagery of the sleeping soldiers correlated to a government paralyzed by internal dissension. Tony Rayns reporting from the Toronto Film Festival opined that the movie was an "angry political attack on the current turmoil in Thailand" although framed as a "lamentation."
Thailand was ruled by a series of military dictators beginning in 1932 when the King of Siam relinquished his monarchical power. Between 1932 and 1997, Thailand’s history is a series of military coups, some of them during the Vietnam war era, influenced by the CIA. In 1997, a new Constitution was framed and free Democratic elections were conducted in 2001. Although the elections were marred by street-fighting, the results were internationally certified as legitimate. But political chaos between Thailand’s five principal parties continued to the point that the military sponsored a coup d’etat in 2006. More protest ensued including violent riots in 2010, the so-called Red Shirts protest. (These riots, arising out of plan to unseat the acting, democratically elected Prime Minister resulted in grenade attacks and open civil war in some parts of Bangkok – 87 people were killed, 1500 injured, and, at least, 51 Red Shirts "disappeared," when the army and police intervened. ) In 2013, the government of Thailand proposed amnesty for political opponents of the regime. This proposal was rescinded, however, shortly after it was made with respect to the Red Shirts. More street fighting ensued and the government succumbed to yet another military coup in 2014. At present, Thailand is ruled by the military junta. Yet another draft of the country’s constitution should be unveiled this year and the acting head of the government, a military general, is proposing the re-education camps be established for political opponents of the present regime.
La Vida es Sueno
At the end of Cemetery of Splendor, we see Jenjira sitting outside the school and watching some boys play soccer in a field that has been uprooted and gouged into heaps of dirt by the military. At least, one of the soccer goals is intact, but the rest of the field is a badlands of pits and piles of muddy earth. It seems impossible that anyone could play soccer in such a place.
But what exactly are we seeing? At least three possibilities exist. First, we may be seeing schoolchildren who are engaged in the quixotic attempt to use their soccer field for play even thought it has been destroyed by the military – this is a literal reading of the image. Second, Jenjira may be dreaming – we may be seeing her dream in which playing children are juxtaposed with the ravaged field. (The film’s final shot, showing Jenjira attempting to become awake – she does this by opening her eyes as wide as possible – in fact, suggests that, perhaps, we are seeing her dream.) A third possibility is that either the children are ghosts or, in the alternative, the cratered field is a ghost – in other words, we are seeing a cratered field infested with the phantoms of boys playing soccer or, in the alternative, boys playing soccer in a future (or past) ghost landscape.
The power and beauty of Cemetery of Splendor is that we don’t make an election as to what the image means. In fact, the image can hold all of these meanings, and probably more, without any incongruity. This is because there is no reality to the meditative mind. In Buddhism, a mind awakened to the truth understands that there is no world, no time, no self, neither me nor you – rather, the only reality is the jewel in the lotus, the divine spark of pure untarnished consciousness. Thus, the world is literally a dream, something that our desires imagine and project, an illusion (like a motion picture) that we take to be true but that is ultimately wholly insubstantial. The objective of consciousness is to become fully awakened, that is to achieve Buddha-mind – an understanding that desire is suffering and that desire
can be overcome. To call the children playing in the excavated field a dream is superfluous – first, we are watching a movie and, so, everything presented is unreal, a mere image. But the world itself, to the Buddhist thinker, is only a dream – what we take to be tangible reality is as insubstantial as a dream, a fiction: the boys playing soccer are not real because nothing is real.
Weerasethakul is homosexual. The AIDS epidemic figures heavily in several of his films. Weerasethakul is also the son of parents who were doctors and says that he was literally "raised in a hospital." The idea that suffering and desire are related seems intrinsic to several of Weerasethakul’s films. This point is made vividly in Cemetery of Splendor when the sleeping soldier displays an erection – desire is what keeps us from enlightenment; the self that desires is asleep, not fully conscious, a sleeper like the young men hospitalized in the old school. Images relating to transfusions, wound-care, catheterization, and the like appear in most of Weerasethakul’s films and signify, I think, the idea that an unenlightened life is one that is enmeshed in desire and suffering.
I think it is a mistake to over-estimate the influence of doctrinal Buddhism on Weerasethakul. There is no evidence that he is particularly religious and seems to have been raised in a secular environment. Most of his formative experiences, at least with respect to art, probably occurred not in Southeast Asia but in the Windy City of Chicago. In interviews, Weerasethakul says that he began to meditate while working on the "Primitive" project – that is, during the period of time that he was directing Uncle Bonmee. Meditation, and, later, reading scientific studies of sleep, have led Weerasethakul to explore the idea that reality is a dream and that we are unable to reliably ascertain whether we are awake or asleep and dreaming. (Weerasthakul notes that sleep involves REM cycles about ninety minutes long – that is, the typical length of a narrative feature film such as the horror movie glimpsed as a trailer in the Cemetery of Splendor). Furthermore, Weerasethakul’s imagery seems more heavily influenced by "folk Buddhism", that is the array of superstitions and associated imagery that Thai peasants hold. In the film, we see a representation of a "rural Hell" – that is, a sculpture garden made by Buddhist monks for didactic purposes. (I am unsure whether this sculpture garden, shown in a ruinous state, was built for the movie or previously existed.) These "rural Hells," often, depicted sinners undergoing torment in Hell – "rural Hells" feature lurid representations of torture and mutilation involving concrete figures, often, with outsized and swollen genitalia. The notion of Hell has no real authority in philosophical Buddhism, but in folk religion, the idea has significant traction – people who sin shall be tortured in a way consistent with the nature of their sins. The "Hell" depicted in Cemetery of Splendor apparently overlies the palace of the goddesses (or, perhaps, the palace where the warring Kings resided.) No trace exists of the palaces now lost for thousands of years. It is only by reason of Jeng’s ability to enter Itt’s mind and recall his earlier incarnations ("past lives") that she can lead Jenjira on a tour of the lost palace. What we are shown of the "Hell" occupying the site is rather mild: a simulated bomb shelter that relates to the fact that the area was a war zone during the Vietnam era – the Communists in Laos, on the other side of the Mekong River, fought supporters of United States in this area – and a grim memento mori, an image of two lovers who are transformed into a skeletal version of themselves in a second concrete sculpture. The "Hell" shows us that the landscape itself is dreaming – the autumnal-looking and mournful woods dream both of a violent and an idyllic past: the war and the long-gone palace.
The word "Buddha" means "one who is fully awakened." At the end of the film, Jenjira opens her eyes as wide as possible, accessing her Buddha-nature – that is, the spark of consciousness that allows her to be fully awakened to the reality of existence. Her mutilated leg reminds us of the Four Noble Truths:
– Life is suffering.
– Suffering is caused by desire.
– Cease desire and suffering ends.
– There is a path by which desire (and, therefore, suffering) can be overcome.
Buddhists imagine existence as controlled by karma. Karma simply means "action" – and the idea is also simple: our past actions determine our present. Similarly, actions committed in an earlier existence condition the terms of our present reincarnation. Finally, as the film shows, history as the actions of many men and women itself possesses a karmic force – a history of ancient war can control the present. Thailand’s ambiguous history during the Vietnam era has a karmic force that has afflicted the present-day nation with suffering, metaphorically depicted as the combat between the ghost-princes that has sapped the energy of the modern-day Thai soldiers.
In Buddhist thought, karma is generally depicted as flowing water. Many, many actions combine to create an almost irresistable force of karmic destiny – thus, the film’s depictions of a great river, presumably the Mekong, shows how the force of hundreds of thousands of human actions combines to create energy that flows in a current in a certain direction. Buddhist practice, however, may reverse the course of karmic influence – for this reason, a person who has attained the status of an Arhat, or enlightened one, is called a "stream-winner", that is, a person who can move against the current of karma. Bad actions, and an unsatisfactory history, can impel us toward a certain karmic destiny, but we have the power within us to reverse or, at least, impede the flow of this current. These ideas are epitomized in a cinematic pendant to Cemetery of Splendor, Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel, also released in 2015. This hour long film was made at the same time that Cemetery of Splendor was produced, apparently, shot in off-hours when the cast and crew were not devoted to making the feature film – it seems to show cast and crew at the hotel where they stayed while shooting scenes by the Mekong River. The final six minutes of Mekong Hotel simply shows the vast expanse of the Mekong River, at flood stage that we are told threatens Bangkok. The river looks like a sea or a great elongated lake and seems to have no current at all – but a tree has fallen into the flood and we can see the force of the mighty river pushing that tree downstream. In the far distance, some people on jet-skis are playing on the river, superficial and futile action that has no effect on the Mekong’s inexorable flow. Since Mekong Hotel features Jenjira Pongpas, the leading lady in Cemetery of Splendor, and, in fact, references certain scenes in the feature film, it is clear that the two films are intended to overlap.
One of Cemetery of Splendor’s more enigmatic sequences shows people in a river-side park. We see them occupy different locations, switching places with one another on the shore of a great river. Buddhism holds that there is no self – "where self is, truth is not." I interpret this sequence as epitomizing this concept – we will all assume various interchangeable positions in the world of suffering or Samsara. Sometimes, we are oppressed, sometimes we are the oppressor – we love and are loved, we reject or injure one another and are, in turn, rejected and injured ourselves. Because there is nothing permanent in our souls, we play many roles all of them interchangeable with one another – and, while we are deluding ourselves with the many roles that we play, the great river of karma flows inexorably by, and through, us.
Monday, July 25, 2016
Mekong Hotel
Mekong Hotel is an hour-long film by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul pendant to his longer feature, Cemetery of Splendor (2015). Even when designed as conventional narratives, the Thai director's films present significant challenges to his audience -- the movies, often, feature utterly bizarre, supernatural events rooted in Thailand's folk Buddhism and are shot in a serene contemplative style that, in some moods of mindfulness, encourages meditation and, in other moods, drowsiness. (I have never watched one of Weerasethakul's films without falling asleep -- and I count myself a fan of the film maker's works.) Mekong Hotel does not present anything like a conventional narrative and its subject matter is very, very strange: at a huge, deserted hotel overlooking the Mekong River, Weerasethakul and a friend with a guitar are designing a sound-track, apparently, the sound track to Mekong Hotel. The man with the guitar begins playing, apparently improvising -- sometimes, he plays what sound like very slow and beautiful blues; other times, he gets lost and has to stop and re-start the music and, for part of the movie, he seems just to be casually strumming his instrument. Nonetheless, the guitar music in its various, improvised modes underlies the entire film and gives it a relaxed, laid-back and contemplative mood. Hungry ghosts called Pobs live in the hotel and are sometimes seen feasting on entrails -- the guts are from eviscerated pets and, sometimes, people. Jenjira Pongpas, the heroine of Cemetery of Splendor, is on hand and, on occasion references events in the other film -- for instance, she mentions her American husband, Frank, a man we met in the Cemetery of Splendor. Lying listlessly on a bed, Jenjira confesses that she is a 600 year old vampire; this doesn't seem to much impress her teenage daughter. Sitting on a balcony over the river, Jenjira recalls being taught how to fire an M16 rifle during the troubles at the time of the war in Vietnam. From the balconies of the hotel, we sometimes see enigmatic events: a big backhoe digs in the river embankment and a strange white column falls over; two workers seem to be sweeping up a parking lot near the hotel. We learn that there is a huge flood underway and that Bangkok may be underwater -- the government is subsidizing boats for the catastrophe. One man has a machine that he wears on his head that projects him outside of his body -- the machine looks like a backpack. Another man kneels on the balcony eating offal while a woman who seems to represent the evil spirit within him berates him -- the man knows about his future lives: he will be reborn as a horse, as several varieties of insect, and, then, as a Filipino boy. Jenjira talks about Laotian refugees and how the government subsidized them to the extent that she wished that she was one of their number. The film's final shot, lasting at least six minutes, is an image of the Mekong River at sunset -- a tree floats down the river toward where one, then, two, then four people on jet skis are aimlessly looping around and around on the vast, gradually darkening expanse of water. The fallen tree drifts out of sight and the four people on jet skis skitter over the surface of the huge river like waterbugs until the film ends.
It's unclear what this film means. I assume that it must be read as an appendix or foreword, perhaps, to Cemetery of Splendor. That film involves the effects of historical trauma on the present and explores the idea that past calamities can rule us, as it were, from their graves. Mekong Hotel seems to be about something similar. Here the previous trauma is specified as anxiety arising from an influx of Laotian refugees into Thailand in the wake of the Vietnam conflict and militarization of the Thai population near the border. In Buddhist thought, bad actions result in karmic consequences, including unfavorable rebirths -- this seems to be one of the themes in Mekong Hotel. I think the film riffs on the idea of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, a place also haunted by ghosts trapped in the past. Thai dissension is visualized in this film as a kind of cannibalism. The violent past is a vampire on the present. But the film, despite its horror movie aspects, is profoundly calm, serene, and contemplative -- the ghosts and vampires are viewed with great tenderness as the victims of historical trauma. The vast Mekong river rolls calmly toward the horizon, uprooting everything including huge trees -- human beings play on the surface of this immense forceful being, but can't affect its flow. History rolls past us and we are like tiny waterbugs cutting inconsequential wakes into the surface of the vast and irresistible current of time and existence.
It's unclear what this film means. I assume that it must be read as an appendix or foreword, perhaps, to Cemetery of Splendor. That film involves the effects of historical trauma on the present and explores the idea that past calamities can rule us, as it were, from their graves. Mekong Hotel seems to be about something similar. Here the previous trauma is specified as anxiety arising from an influx of Laotian refugees into Thailand in the wake of the Vietnam conflict and militarization of the Thai population near the border. In Buddhist thought, bad actions result in karmic consequences, including unfavorable rebirths -- this seems to be one of the themes in Mekong Hotel. I think the film riffs on the idea of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, a place also haunted by ghosts trapped in the past. Thai dissension is visualized in this film as a kind of cannibalism. The violent past is a vampire on the present. But the film, despite its horror movie aspects, is profoundly calm, serene, and contemplative -- the ghosts and vampires are viewed with great tenderness as the victims of historical trauma. The vast Mekong river rolls calmly toward the horizon, uprooting everything including huge trees -- human beings play on the surface of this immense forceful being, but can't affect its flow. History rolls past us and we are like tiny waterbugs cutting inconsequential wakes into the surface of the vast and irresistible current of time and existence.
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Rio Bravo
As far as I know, most people like Rio Bravo and the film's critical reputation, steadfastly promoted by critics like David Thomson, has grown. I've seen Howard Hawks' 1959 Western start to finish at least three times, and have dipped into the film on many other occasions, and must admit that I dislike the picture -- indeed, I think the film is not just rebarbative but perversely irritating. Rio Bravo is strangely ugly -- the film consists of one interior shot after another and the picture's color scheme is nauseating: everything is the color of what you might find in a 8 month old infant's diaper. There are very few exterior shots and those generally show an Old West main street, probably built for some other movie and used for a dozen other pictures (as well as TV shows) -- the set is devoid of interest, plopped down in a barren desert that is also devoid of any scenic interest. The film is intensely static -- it's subject is a stand-off between a small group of beleaguered law men and a horde of incompetent bad hombres. In Peckinpah's Westerns, and John Ford's pictures for that matter, the bad guys are intensely individuated -- they have picturesque appearances and habits. In Hawks' Western, the bad guys are led by a bland fellow who seems to be modeled on a low-level corporate executive. With the exception of one dude who looks like he should be speaking Farsi, the henchmen are just fungible cannon fodder. After John Wayne has killed about 12 of them, it occurs to me that the real heroism in this film is shown by the ever-diminishing group of criminals who valiantly keep up their doomed attack even though it is apparent that the good guys are infallible, dead-eye shots, and, also, seemingly impermeable to bullets. The movie is slapdash, carelessly assembled (important plot points are forgotten for long periods of time), and highly repetitive -- the film is mostly shots of John Wayne and his colleagues sitting around drinking coffee or images of them striding around the nondescript main street. Some pictures that are just thrown together, apparently, on a whim, have a certain shaggy charm -- that's not true of Rio Bravo: the movie feels immensely long, doesn't build suspense in any way, and, although it has some clever thirties' style tough-guy talk, most of what we see is forgettable and, even, deplorable. Angie Dickinson as Feathers spends most of her screen-time trying to get John Wayne to undress her -- she is so pathetically needy as to be almost unwatchable. This subplot has a particularly nasty flavor because Wayne seems to be about thirty-five years older than her -- Wayne didn't age particularly well and, in this film, he's often shot in an unflattering way that makes him look more elderly than his curmudgeonly side-kick, Stubby (played by Walter Brennan without his dentures). It's impossible to understand why Feathers would have any sexual interest in John T. Chance, a gruff, socially inept gunman old enough to be her father. The plot as everyone knows involves John Wayne as Chance, the hamlet's sheriff, guarding a bad man and murderer. Chance's deputy is played improbably by Dean Martin. Martin is a drunk and much of the film commends the use of beer to combat alcoholism. Martin, who looks physically wet and sticky, seems to be half the size of John Wayne and he is probably the best thing about the film -- his whisky-addled desperation seems, more or less, realistic. (Of course, Hawks' spoils this aspect of the movie by putting in a couple musical numbers for Martin to sing with the male ingénue, Ricky Nelson -- the songs are actually pretty good and considering that nothing much else is happening in the film, the musical interlude isn't half-bad.) The final gunfight is effectively staged although half-way through the shooting, the whole thing deteriorates into a kind of sport entirely lacking in any kind of suspense and, also, unpleasant in the sense that it suggests that the good guys are murdering the bad guys for sport, that is, for the sheer hell of it. There is a Mexican innkeeper and his spitfire wife who embody just about every cliché about Hispanics that can be imagined. Comparing the film to Anthony Mann's greatly superior Man from Laramie, Rio Bravo lacks Jimmy Stewart's quivering, barely repressed hysteria -- in fact, all the lead characters in Man from Laramie seemed to suffer from a sort of peculiarly masculine hysteria, every one was afflicted with some species of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an undertow of powerful emotion that made the violent confrontations seem much more violent and consequential. By contrast, Rio Bravo feels curiously detached -- none of the shootings mean much of anything. When Ward Bond, playing John Wayne's old friend, is gunned-down in the street, there is no emotion shown by anyone; in fact, the most emotion shown in the film is Dean Martin's quaking hand as he reaches for a shot of whiskey. I understand that the essence of Rio Bravo is an intense, almost psychotic stoicism -- but stoicism is not as photogenic as more emotional reactions to the events depicted. (Admirers of the film would probably claim that the emotion is repressed -- but I don't see any emotion at all.) The most memorable thing about Rio Bravo is Walter Brennan's demonic cackle after he uses his shotgun to kill two bad guys trying to ford a tiny creek. (By the way, there is no Rio Bravo in Rio Bravo -- the title is meaningless misnomer.) The problem with Rio Bravo is that it is ugly, offensive, and, most of all, exceptionally tedious.
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