History Lessons

History Lessons (1972) is an adaptation of an unfinished novel by Bertolt Brecht, a book called The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.  The film is challenging and, probably, better than it looks when you are watching it.  Straub and Huillet's approach to Brecht's didactic text is equally didactic and, perhaps, may be accused of being "uncinematic" -- I think a better word for the film is that it employs a minimalist style so as better to emphasize the parameters controlling the picture and any deviations from those parameters.  David Bordwell, as far as I know, coined the term "parametric" to describe a certain kind of abstract style deployed by some directors, most notably Bresson and Ozu.  A film built according to a "parametric" mise-en-scene establishes certain abstract norms, that is, specific regularly repeated images or types of images, a pattern in the editing that may be non-narrative, and an approach to the material that shapes the plot (or film's argument) to stylistic parameters as opposed to the contrary approach in which the style supports and enhances the narrative by emphasis or dramatization.  Parametric films, often, give the impression of being austere and intentionally unexpressive -- History Lessons is an excellent example of a movie designed according to abstract parameters.  Film critics have counted 49 shots in the movie which is about ninety minutes long.  A third of the film consists of imagery shot from the back seat of a small car navigating the claustrophobically narrow and busy streets of Rome. A young man drives the car in "real time", shifting gears, eluding collisions with oncoming cars, sometimes trapped in traffic jams, on other occasions having to back up to yield to oncoming vehicles confronting him in the tight alley-like lanes.  These shots are lengthy and without edits -- as long as ten minutes.  Between the traffic scenes, we see actors dressed in vaguely antique costume, modified Roman togas -- these actors speak, in some cases, in lengthy monologues or, in other cases, respond to the questions of the interlocutor.  (The interlocutor turns out to be the young man in the car -- he is posited as a kind of journalist or investigator seeking information about Caesar.)   Images of water -- a rushing mountain stream, a fountain, a turbulent bay on a rock-girt coast punctuate the film and serve, in two instances, as establishing shots.  The film ends with a lengthy immobile shot of an ornamental fountain in Rome disgorging a stream of clear water from the mouth of a bas relief face, a sort of staring Gorgon spitting water into a basin.

The monologues describe Julius Caesar's activities in terms of economics.  The four characters provide elaborately detailed information about Caesar's investments, the structure of the Roman economy particularly with regard to the interplay between the ruling classes and the proletariat and the role that war plays in furthering economic interests.  (These speeches are lengthy and complex and the subtitles provide translation for only about half of what is spoken -- my German isn't quick enough to reliably translate the parts of the monologues or dialogue not put into English in the subtitles.  However, as far as I can tell, the most characteristically Brechtian aspects of the monologues -- that is, acerbic asides, parenthetical remarks, additional footnote-type detail -- is not put into subtitles, that is, left untranslated.  In effect, the subtitles provide only a bare outline of what is being said.  In the monologues, filmed generally from a high close angle in lengthy three or four minute shots, the characters discuss the relationship between the price of grain, the growth of the great estates, the repression of the peasant class, and the expansion of slave trading.  Caesar's adventures in Spain are not depicted in a martial light but instead described as efforts to compel a primitive mountain-dwelling tribal people to labor in silver and copper mines.  Various battles with pirates at sea, many of them involving "the great Pompey," are revealed to be the military epiphenomena to a vigorous competition between slave-trading businesses -- the Romans want to monopolize the slave trade in Asia Minor but are confronted by aggressive and entrepreneurial pirates competing for the same commodities and markets.  Characteristically, history presents this conflict as a struggle between law-abiding Roman merchants and lawless pirates -- in fact, both sides to the conflict are merely businessmen trying to outflank their opponents in a lucrative mercantile endeavor.  The crucial difference between this situation and modern business competition is that the victors get to literally crucify their adversaries.  The influx of huge numbers of slaves into the agrarian economy destroys the livelihood of the peasants (their farms can't compete with the huge estates operated with efficient slave labor).  The peasants swarm into the "City" as Rome is called in the film and form an underclass that "democrats" like Caesar manipulate.  And so it goes -- the level of legal and economic commentary is very sophisticated and hard to follow:  it's like a graduate level lecture on the Marxist implications of Roman commerce and war.  The most loquacious of the commentators is a well-groomed middle-aged Roman who seems to know everything there is to know about Julius Caesar's (he calls him "C") business dealings.  At first, we hypothesize that this actor is playing Caesar himself.  Only at the end of the film is it revealed that this fellow is Caesar's banker.  The film ends establishing the close relationship between Caesar's enterprises and the bank -- "thus," the banker says, "as Caesar prospered, our little bank was little no more."  In the final ten minutes of the movie, the young man from the car scenes, the interlocutor, sits with his hands folded on his lap with his arms not inserted into his jacket:  this creates a curious image of impotence -- the man's arms don't seem to be quite properly connected to his body.  The banker's monologue also results in the most surprising and, even, viscerally shocking cut in the film:  the banker, after his first monologue, sits bemused, motionless, without speaking; the camera lingers on him for a long period of time, creating an oddly uncanny ambience, and, then, suddenly without warning, the image cuts to a close-up of water tumbling in rapids down a hillside, a torrent of water with its sound loudly amplified on the soundtrack.  On a small screen, this effect was startling -- in a movie theater, I presume the cut would cause the audience to jump out of its collective skin. 

History Lessons is tedious, albeit in learned, scholarly sort of way.  The film does focus your attention -- minor aspects of the imagery, the way someone sits or speaks, the color of the rhododendrons in the garden where the banker is speaking, a row of vases on a parapet, or, in one scene, the young man picking a fallen leave off his jacket and, then, flicking it away, all have substantial impact.  The movie schools you in a certain kind of precise, concentrated looking.  The traffic scenes are nightmarish -- the impression that they provide is of continuous progress in the face of innumerable obstructions:  the driver weaves between pedestrians and oncoming cars in tiny, narrow alleys, many of them congested with parked cars.  It's a sort of ballet involving a continuous threat of collision.  I presume that these images are intended as a metaphor for the labyrinthine course of economic history -- its stops and starts and obstructions.  In this film, things flow -- people speak in long monologues, a stream surges through an idyllic valley, the sea crashes against rocks, money and commodities change hands,  currency is valued and devalued, a stone mouth vomits water into a fountain. 

Queen of the Desert

Some years ago, I saw a picture called Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.  If I  recall correctly the movie was about a flamboyant transsexual traveling by bus through the Australian outback.  The movie was colorful, irritating, and contained beautiful shots of the desert.  I was surprised to see this film on Netflix, clicked on Queen of the Desert and encountered something equally colorful, irritating, and unlikely -- Werner Herzog's 2014 biopic of Gertrude Bell, the doughty female desert explorer, starring Nicole Kidman.  The film has been lavishly reviled, unjustly in my view.  It's a strange picture.  Of course, all of Herzog's movies are strange.  But this film is peculiar in ways that suggest Herzog should never have attempted this movie -- most of the picture goes against his grain and it's hard to know what to make of the resulting film.  An adjective that Herzog often uses in interviews is "fluffy" -- by this he means, "soft," "gentle", and even, "compromised."  Queen of the Desert vacillates between scenes undercut by silly, didactic dialogue and images of great beauty.  Much of it is fundamentally "fluffy" and it's hard to know what Herzog thought he was doing in some sequences.  Plotting has never been a strong point in Herzog films and his movies have rarely, if ever, featured showy or important parts for women.  Queen of the Desert plays as a kind of cross between the bodice-ripping romance of The English Patient and the wide-screen Orientalism of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.  Herzog has always been primarily a documentary director -- his fiction films generally purport to "ecstatic truth" and are remarkable in large part due to the rigors endured in making them.  Thus, Herzog harbors a powerful and intrinsically German streak of didacticism -- this aspect of his sensibility is also on display in the film's extended scenes involving historical exposition.

Queen of the Desert begins with a bunch of men dressed up as dignitaries discussing how the British intend to carve-up the Middle East.  The cigar-chomping Winston Churchill is on display as is T. E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) and a courtly, handsome Dudley-do-right sort of guy, Major Wylie.  (Wylie is played by Damien Lewis, best known to me as Axe from a "guilty pleasure", the Showtime series Billions -- here his perpetual sneer is masked by a moustache.)  The dialogue is wooden and nakedly expository -- someone suggests that the territories can't be divided without considering Gertrude Bell's discoveries.  This puts some of the men into a state of enraged apoplexy -- although, Major Wylie is soft-spoken and suggests that she knows better than all the ways of the desert folk.  After this baldly expository beginning, the film shows us Gertrude Bell as a debutante -- she dances with various men at a ball and finds them all ineffectual and dull. (Kidman who had to be in her forties when the film was made convincingly plays the ingénue role.) Gertrude prevails on her doting father to allow her to travel for adventure to the British embassy in Damascus.  There she meets a dashing military attaché played by James Franco at his most smarmy.  Franco's character teaches Gertrude Farsi and together they construe and translate Omar Khayyam -- "so this word means 'jug'?"  "Yes, this is 'jug' and this word means 'loaf"." So a jug of wine and a loaf of bread and 'you' -- what is that verb? 'singing'?"  Of course, translating these erotic verses leads to a torrid love affair.  Gertrude goes back to her country estate in England to plead with her father that she be allowed to marry James Franco's military attaché.  For some reason that seems unclear Gertrude's father refuses.  Franco pitches himself off a cliff at their trysting place, committing suicide in such a way as to send an unmistakable message to Gertrude that she has failed him.  Gertrude mourns extravagantly and considers herself "widowed."  She returns to Damascus where she encounter Major Wylie.  Wylie falls under her spell -- this is not surprising since she is fantastically beautiful, willowy, and towering.  Compared to the little beleaguered men in the movie, Nicole Kidman is a goddess and Herzog's camera is under her spell as well, often shooting her in pools of light that are expressionist and not realistically motivated -- she seems to absorb the light and folds of her alabaster white desert robes glow with mystical radiance.  Herzog's films often involve journeys across dangerous and exotic terrain and in the second half of the movie -- it's about two hours long -- he is working in a genre that he invented and in which he is comfortable.  The picture involves not one but two spectacular journeys across vast expanses of blowing sand -- this is a very windy movie.   First, Gertrude travels to the Druse sheikh with whom she discusses poetry -- she earns his trust and gives him a pair of expensive and beautiful dueling pistols that, for some reason, Major Wylie had given her back in Damascus.  She returns to Damascus where Wylie expresses his love -- but, unfortunately, he's still unhappily married.  Gertrude goes back into the desert, this time on a mission to determine whether Ibn Rashid or Ibn Saud will gain hegemony over the Bedouin tribes.  After many difficulties, she reaches Ibn Rashid's fortified city --  Rashid is in hiding and the town seems under the control of Fatima, a sinister Aunt.  Later, the young Emir arrives, a mere boy who seems to be about 16.  He demands her for his harem.  Imperiously, she notes that the prophet would never condone a man touching a married woman -- and she regards herself as married.  With regal dignity, she simply walks out of the prison-like labyrinth where she has been confined pending the boys arrival and returns to Damascus.  There, Wylie announces that he can't marry her (his wife would commit suicide) and has enlisted in a combat position -- it's 1915.  Predictably,  Wylie is killed in battle.  Gertrude sees Churchill and other military men posing for pictures at the pyramids -- Herzog lavishes scorn on Winston Churchill whom he regards as a feckless bully.  Gertrude travels into the desert a third time to meet with two young men inexplicably sitting in a tent in the wasteland with falcons on their wrists.  She prophecies that the young men will be kings and, then, rides alone into the infinitely vast and featureless desert.  Several closing titles tell us that the two young men later became the kings of Jordan and Syria.  Ibn Saud consolidated the desert tribes under his rule.  And Gertrude Bell, a title says, "delineated" the boundaries of the countries in the present Middle East.

It's hard to know how we should interpret this ending.  Obviously, the British-imposed boundaries "delineating" the Middle East have proven to be catastrophic -- are we supposed to blame Gertrude Bell for 9 - 11 or the various wars between Iraq, Iran, the Kurds, and the USA?  Are we supposed to blame her for the Druse militia and the collapse of Syria?  Most scholars believe that the arbitrary assignment of nation-state boundaries upon heterogenous groups of people who never really liked one another has caused enormous turbulence and instability in the Middle East.  (The film is curiously silent about Palestine.)  Most of the film is very conventional -- even somewhat stolid and dull.  Herzog excels in the travel scenes, using drone-borne cameras to show the caravans moving through endless seas of sand.  Most remarkably, the film's interiors are splendid, as remarkable as the landscapes -- Herzog shows dimly lit Alhambras full of fountains, tapestries, with marble gazebos under domes and pointed archways surrounded by elaborate filigree patterns.  Beams of light pierce the darkness and, when Nicole Kidman stands in those lime-lit pools of sun, she glows with an otherworldly radiance.  The tiny desert hamlets and fortified villages (the film was shot in Morocco and Jordan) are all spectacular.  There are impressive shots of Gertrude and her guides wandering in deep, dangerous-looking slot canyons.  At the end of one canyon, rather predictably, we encounter Lawrence of Arabia with a boyfriend excavating the Nabatean city of Petra -- Lawrence has not yet become warlike and he talks like Oscar Wilde.  The soundtrack is conventional -- there are no operatic arias.  In fact, Herzog seems generally exceedingly restrained in the way he has devised this movie.  There are only a couple of avowedly Herzogian sequences -- in one, Herzog displays his love for the Roman poet, Virgil; the action stops while Gertrude and the Sheikh of the Druse discuss the distinction between "naming" and "describing" particularly vis a vis Virgil's Georgics (poems about farming) that I know from various interviews to be Herzog's favorite work of poetry.  In another scene, a desert ruler shows his contempt for the British by sending a dwarf from the gates of his city leading two men who ride backward on donkeys -- apparently, this is some kind of profound insult.  The problem with the film is that the love scenes although passionate enough aren't really Herzog's métier and he seems vaguely embarrassed by them.  Similarly, the film's structure is prosaically repetitive -- there is not one but two dangerous journeys through the desert, two times when Bedouins firing guns encircle Ms. Bell's troop and two occasions on which she gives lavish gifts to Sheikhs -- in one case the dueling pistols and, later, a pair of binoculars.  The question of whether Gertrude Bell is, in fact, a British spy is left curiously confused -- we see her indignantly turning down the request that she spy but her intelligence and maps turn out to be fundamental to the British management of the Middle East. 

In general, this was an ill-advised project for Herzog.   The film doesn't succeed.  Herzog can't claim that control was wrested from him -- he both wrote and directed the movie and seems to have had a large budget.  The problem is that the material is formless and would have been better managed as a two-hour documentary.  Kidman is radiant and Herzog seems to adore her, but the picture is a little bit dull.  It's certainly not as bad as its reputation and, if the viewer has an interest in this subject matter -- which is intrinsically fascinating -- the picture is worth viewing.     

    

Aniara

Aniara is a Greek word that means "sadness" or "despair".  The title aptly describes an exceptionally dispiriting science fiction film directed by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja that adapts for the screen a Nobel-prize winning 103 canto long "space epos" written in the mid-1950's by the Swedish poet, Harry Martinson.  The film is literally a one-way trip to oblivion and, true to its name, induces a sort of helpless depression in its viewers -- when I saw the film at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis, the small audience filed out of the auditorium in gloomy silence.  It was a windy night and the rain-wet streets seemed darker and more menacing than they had been before I came to the theater.  The most popular critical take on the film is that it is like Star Trek as directed by Ingmar Bergman -- a morose plunge in Scandinavian angst and darkness.  In fact, Bergman's films often offer some glimmer of hope and, at their greatest, provide the complex pleasures of tragedy.  Aniara seems more akin to Lars von Trier's horribly distressing Melancholia, also apocalyptic Science Fiction in which the subjective state of clinical depression becomes an objective correlative (or is it vice-versa) for the end of the earth when the moon draws near and smashes into our planet.  After that film, also uniquely dispiriting, most of the audience were speechless with misery although some people were so distressed they felt that they had to discuss the picture with complete strangers and seek reassurance that it was, in fact, a bad movie.  (Melancholia, like Aniara, is not a bad movie -- but I don't know that I can recommend these deep dives in stygian gloom to anyone.) 

In Aniara, about 400 passengers embark on a three-week voyage to Mars.  The space ship is like a casino-hotel connected to several nice shopping malls.  It has plenty of haute cuisine restaurants, shops, a big swimming pool, and something called Mimara, a virtual reality emporium where people can come to experience idyllic pastoral scenes as a respite from the austere bunk rooms and the shopping malls.  The space-ship carries refugees from a world that climate change has rendered infernal -- many of the people seem to have suffered severe, even disfiguring facial burns, although this aspect of their appearance is never overtly mentioned.  Some nuts and bolts of space debris are floating around and one of them knocks the space-craft off course.  The space-craft's pilot tells the frightened passengers that the trip may last as long as two years -- the ship needs to loop around the gravity of another planet to get back on course.  But the pilot knows that the ship is now heading into the oblivion of outer space and that it will never reach Mars or anywhere else for that matter.  At first, the people on the vessel try to make the best of their plight -- after all, they expect to be home in a few years.  The ship has algae in huge tanks that photosynthesize to produce oxygen and the algae is also edible -- the steaks and shrimp in the expensive restaurants run out in about two months.  After a few years, the people on the space-ship start to go mad.  They invent strange religious cults.  There situation becomes more desperate when the Mimara virtual reality machine goes crazy itself and starts broadcasting images of fire and death and destruction.  The virtual reality system is closed although its empty room -- people experienced the VR by lying face-down on the carpeted floor -- becomes a sort of shrine, and later a tabernacle for sexual orgies.  Things don't improve.  About five years into the trip to nowhere, a space craft is spotted.  The people on the vessel think  that this has been sent to provide nuclear fuel to save them.  For months, the space craft's crew work to develop devices to seize the long, narrow vessel floating in space -- it's called "the spear".  This object is several football fields long, but when it is captured, it proves to be an enigmatic artifact from some alien civilization, completely impermeable and meaningless.  Lots of people commit suicide.  By the 23rd year, there are only a dozen survivors, huddled together in the empty Mimara chamber -- the shops have been looted and the corridors are filled with garbage and corpses.  After about 5.9 million years, the space craft, now named "The Sarcophagus", reaches the Lyra constellation where it flies by a blue planet with clouds and continents.  A shot inside the sarcophagus shows that the empty tomb is weightless inside -- dust floats around in the air and we see a human mandible slowly spin by.  Thus, the film ends.

The story is told through the point of view of a female scientist called Mima, apparently, the inventor of the VR system.  After about eight or nine years, she invents a way to produce holographic images so that the survivors in the ship can look out the window to see lush Scandinavian forests and meadows with waterfalls -- whether this cheers anyone up or just contributes to their despair is unclear.  In the tenth year of the voyage, called "Jubilee", the pilot gives Mima a medal to celebrate her accomplishment in creating the holographic system.  His wrists are bloody and bandaged from a suicide attempt.  Mima goes to her bedroom, now filled with dirty clothing, throws the medallion aside, and sprawls face-down on the bed, too miserable to even cry.  Earlier she had a love affair with a female pilot named Isagel -- Isagel had sex with one of the men on the ship and gave birth to a baby.  But Isagel kills herself at the three-quarter point in the film and drowns the baby as well.  All of this is more or less unbearable -- and I've left out many, many other deaths that the film scrupulously, and clinically, documents. 

The movie is terrifically claustrophobic.  For the most part, it is shot in extreme close-ups.  Some of the close-ups are so tight that the images seem extracted from an experimental film by Stan Brakhage -- we see an eyelash, a milky eye, skin pocked with pores like craters.  A disconcerting element is the occasional presence of facially disfigured burn victims in the movie -- at least several of these people seem to be real burn victims.  If they were Klingons or some sort of odd alien life form, their ugliness would startle, perhaps, but not disturb -- but they are people who are, in fact, mutilated and their presence in the movie is terrible reminder of the sort of horrible conditions prevailing on earth.  I suppose the film is allegorical, a bit like von Trier's Melancholia.  We are destroying our space vessel by overheating it with carbon emissions -- the earth is like the space-ship in the movie, a craft on a one-way trip to nowhere.  And, indeed, the film raises this question:  aren't all of us trapped on this planet and, therefore, doomed by what we have done to it?  Life is hopeless -- only the dead are fortunate.  Isagel kills her baby because as she says:  "I am giving birth in a prison and my baby will be a prisoner.  We are all living in a sarcophagus."  But doesn't this  existential formula apply to all of us?

Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali (1955) is the sort of worthy film that I have spent my life attempting avoid.  Once I heard an interview with a woman who had become the head of India's division of Coca-Cola.  Called upon to defend selling sugary no-nutrition drinks to people in poverty, the woman responded in a perky way:  "We make products that are fun for you and products that are good for you.  It's your choice which you buy."  Satjiyat Ray's first film is too arduous, harrowing, and slow-paced to be fun for you -- it's subject is poverty unimaginable to most America viewers.  (A man labors four months and earns just enough to buy a few handfuls of rice, a sari for his daughter, a framed picture of a deity for his wife, and a bit of ratty fabric to make shawl for an old woman.)  The characters wear tattered clothing and argue viciously over a dropped guava fruit.  Everyone is constantly nibbling on something, but it doesn't seem that anything that they eat provides much nourishment.  The movie has indelible acting -- you will remember some of the performances in Pather Panchali all of your life (although those memories are not exactly pleasant) and it is beautifully shot on location: many of the black and white landscapes are beautiful.  But the subject matter, an exhausting perpetual battle with starvation, is too harsh to be fun for you.  In fact, the movie exactly met my expectations:  it is morose, extremely heartbreaking, and, ultimately, irrelevant to an upper middle-class American.  Perhaps, most of the world lives like these people, but their fate seems so deeply entrenched, so hopeless, that the picture leaves you with despair -- the poverty that Ray shows doesn't even have a cause; it's simply the way things are.  (In fairness, the dire material in Pather Panchali is part of a three-part or trilogy of films -- the entire project is a sort of Bildungsroman and possibly shows the hero ascending from the poverty that is his lot in life in the first picture.) 

A Brahman family lives in a tiny village.  The family members put on airs -- the father is a sort of poet, playwright, and, also, makes pocket-change performing religious rituals.  But they are very poor -- even by the standards of their neighbors who are also desperately impoverished.  The family once owned an interest in an orchard, but they have lost that property.  This doesn't keep the spunky, rebellious little girl in the family from picking up fruit fallen from the trees in the orchard or, even, from time to time, stealing the crop on the branches.  This little girl, Durga, is reputed to be a thief and one motif in the film relates to this reputation and how it reflects on her sad-eyed, harried mother.  The mother gives birth to a baby boy -- this is Apu, the protagonist in Ray's trilogy.  Apu is sent to school -- it's run by a tyrannical local grocer and he learns to read and write.  Durga, of course, will have to be married-off, although, for some reason, she doubts that she will ever be a bride.  Freeloading off the family is an elderly woman -- everyone calls her Auntie.  She's malicious and temperamental -- age has bent her double and she's a frightening apparition with only one or two teeth in her sunken jaw, half her face seemingly paralyzed, and always  shrilly complaining that she has no shawl to keep off the evening chill.  The film was made in West Bengal and it seems always to be stifling -- no one wears much clothing: Auntie just has some rags wrapped around the front of her torso, she's mostly naked behind.  Durga has been stealing guava to keep Auntie alive -- otherwise, it seems that she might simply starve to death.  Various low-key adventures occur:  a group of traveling players comes to town, Durga is accused of stealing a necklace and this causes a terrific battle between mother and daughter, a candy seller plies his wares in the village and a man who has a sort of magic lantern device that shows the wonders of India solicit the children for pennies.  Apu and Durga's father who is feckless, if kind, leaves to earn money in Benares.  His wife has denounced him for not taking an advance fee for a ceremony that he has been asked to perform at the coming of age of two sons of a neighbor in the village -- her criticism turns out to be right:  both boys die and the father doesn't earn the fee.  While he is gone, Auntie dies.  Durga and Apu go across a meadow to see a train chugging by.  This is the first time they have seen a locomotive and it makes them deliriously happy.  The summer heat is broken by the monsoon.  Durga rapturously washes her hair in the downpour, gets sick, and dies.  Father returns from Benares with a sari for Durga and collapses in grief when he learns that she has died.  Durga's death frees the family from their ancestral home and village.  In the final shot, we see them huddled together in an ox-cart heading across the swampy roads for the big city.  It's twilight and they have a lantern hanging from the side of the wagon.  (Ermanno Olmi duplicates this shot in his similar film The Tree of the Wooden Clogs -- it's also the last scene in that movie.) 

This narrative is elegantly presented in a series of luminous close-ups, squalid interior scenes, and beautiful landscape imagery.  Apparently, water-striders on ponds signify the heat of summer and Ray has a long sequence comprised simply of bugs (dragonflies and water-striders) skimming over a pool full of lotus blossoms -- it's an exquisite calligraphic image and prepares us for the onslaught of the monsoon which ends up killing Durga and destroying most of the family's outbuildings next to crumbling stone farmhouse where they live.  The landscapes in general have a distracting beauty which conceals the fact that no one has enough to eat in this area.  We don't ever see the village as a whole -- Ray uses no establishing shots:  it's simply some trees, pathways, a little stone altar, and the insides of gloomy houses.  The poor are not idealized -- indeed, they have flaws that are apparent for all to see.  Sabaryaya, the sad housewife, is arrogant and ill-tempered:  in the nasty fight with her daughter, she drags the girl around by the hair.  The father is useless, a dreamer, who can't make any money to support his family.  Most surprisingly, the elderly woman is a sort of monster -- she is self-centered, filches food from others, and, when she doesn't get her way, angrily limps away to live with someone else (although she always returns).  Apu is wide-eyed and a beautiful child but he is not above stealing his sister's few toys -- he takes tinfoil from her "toy box" to make a silver moustache for himself in imitation of one of the traveling players.  Durga is a thief -- in fact, after she has died, Apu discovers a cup where a ugly-looking spider lives; in the cup, there is the necklace that Durga stole from the neighbor-lady.  This woman is arrogant and hostile, a gossip, and seems to be very cruel -- but when the family runs the risk of starvation, she is the first to offer them rice to tide them over.  The movie is wildly unstable mixture of the poetic and the deeply disturbing:  Auntie dies squatting against a tree in a beautiful landscape next to a little path engraved in the meadow by thousands of years of people walking back and forth over it (the movie's title means "The Song of the Little Road'); the camera frames the candy-seller trudging with his double baskets and yoke through the monsoon rains, then, tilts down to show Durga, comatose, dying with her eyes open.  When the monsoon blows down an outbuilding, an overhead shot shows an unholy mess of fallen timbers and thatching with a huge dead bullfrog in the center of the composition.  When Apu is born, we first see him as a swaddling bundles -- someone lifts up a corner of the rags to reveal a great staring eye.  It's this eye, mechanized as a camera, that will govern the film.  When famine strikes, Apu's mother sells all the brass serving platters and tea pots that she received in her wedding.  Later, when a neighbor discovers that the family is down to only a few handfuls of rice, she offers to loan the starving neighbors some of her rice.  "Oh no," Apu's mother proudly says.  "I can sell my brass vessels from the wedding"-- but we know that she has already pawned them.  After Durga's death, Apu's father says that "All my plans have come to nothing."  At last, he echoes his wife's complaint that she had always hoped for a better life but that this village is strangling her death.  Underlying all of the exotic, and fabulous imagery is the music of Ravi Shankar providing a counterpoint to the misery that we are shown. 

Renoir made his film The River (1951), also involving the death of a child, in West Bengal and employed Satjiyat Ray as an assistant.  Renoir's 1934 film Toni, about migrant workers in the south of France, is viewed as the progenitor of the Italian neo-realist movement.  Renoir's The River is a meditation on the allegedly documentary truth revealed by Italian neo-Realist films, an attempt to apply the elements of that canon to India.  Ray continues neo-realism in his films, at least, at the outset of his career -- twenty years later, when Ermanno Olmi makes The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, he pirates the last shot of the peasants departing for an uncertain future in the big city from Ray's picture for his own movie.  Thus, film influences circle, spiral and loop.

Mil Mascaras v. Aztec Mummy

Like masterpieces, truly bad films are hard to make and rare to see.  The world is full of mediocre movies, but a film that is truly awful can be paradoxically memorable and, even, perhaps raise questions about the nature of the medium itself.  In a fundamental way, film is a spectacle that people are willing to pay to behold.  Spectacle can mean many things -- after all, people pay good money to attend professional wrestling matches; indeed, the current President of the United States was once closely affiliated with the World Wrestling Federation and Miss Universe.  At its essence, a movie is a light show with words and music, son et lumiere and a transcendentally terrible move like Mil Mascaras v. The Aztec Mummy (2010 Andrew Quint aka Jeff Burr & Chip Gubera) reveals some uncomfortable truths about films and film-making.  As Pauline Kael pointed out, the greatest films are often the silliest -- that is, the closest to plummeting into cult badness.  Most films are trash and sometimes a consumer and critic needs to be reminded of this fact from time to time.

A bad movie on the heroic scale has several characteristics:  first the filmmaker's paltry means are so pathetically incommensurate with his ambition (with very few exceptions the makers of really bad movies are all men, usually hustlers of some kind -- this gender distinction deserves further thought as well.).  Thus, such films are often wildly ambitious, but lack the budget, technical means, and skill to achieve the desired ends.  Movies of this kind often arise in cultic subcultures -- for instance, Mil Mascaras is Mexican masked wrestler film (a so-called Luchadora), a genre without honor, cross-bred with a horror film, another Mexican genre, the Aztec mummy movie.  In films of these kinds -- and Exhibit A is oeuvre of Ed Wood -- the actors are given flamboyantly florid and overwritten lines to speak:  this kind of dialogue would tax the skills of Lawrence Olivier, but must be delivered by an actor who seems scarcely capable of speaking English and may be half illiterate.  Commensurate with the film's overweening ambition is its grandiose plot -- generally something about saving the world that would require fifty million dollars in special effects.  But the budget is tragically low so that the filmmaker is required to desperately improvise to merely hint at the majestic images that he would supply if only he had more than the credit limit on his mother's MasterCard for financing.  As I have noted above, the truly scary thing about these films is that they are monstrously exploitative, garishly designed to push the buttons in the "deplorable" who rages within all of us -- in this respect, these films are only a hair's breadth from pictures like Avengers:  Endgame in which thirty seconds of film probably cost twenty times what was spent to make Mil Mascaras v. The Aztec Mummy -- and, yet, Mils Mascaras is about ten times as interesting and fun as the 200 million dollar spectacle that is the most recent Avengers movie.

In an Aztec tomb hidden beneath a pyramid that is incongruously within walking distance of central Mexico City, a strange ritual is taking place.  In a torchlit crypt, a beautiful half-naked woman does a sensuous snake dance around a sarcophagus containing a hideous Aztec mummy.  A fat priest intones some words and, then, another fat, bare-chested campesino performs an auto-sacrifice, using a flint blade to wrench his still beating heart from his chest, smearing blood all over the jaws of the Aztec Mummy.  The Mummy, needless to say, comes to life and vows, for some reason, to take over the world.  Meanwhile in a posh restaurant, the great masked wrestler Mil Mascaras ("Thousand Masks") is dining with his blonde girlfriend.  She says that she is leaving him.  Mil asks her mournfully if it is because his face "must always be covered with a mask."  She denies this motive but it's pretty clear that she is a bigot of the worst kind -- prejudiced against Mexican masked wrestlers.  Poor Mil goes out by a stream where he broods on his sad fate:  "Why must I wear this mask?" he cries.  The Aztec Mummy and his cadaver henchmen (or hypnotized minions) are robbing blood banks in the city.  The Mummy uses a scepter with a hypnagogic gem to mesmerize a sulky young man who helps with the robberies.  Mil is very good friends with a handsome scientist, the Professor.  The scientist has built a robot warrior in his lab and has a beautiful young daughter who "has feelings for" Mil.  Mil thwarts a blood bank robbery resulting in the sulky young zombie being dragged back to the Aztec tomb where he is tortured to death -- "the Aztecs," the scientist tells us, "have mastered all of the arts of torture."  Mil Mascaras, who is also a pilot, flies to Washington D.C. where he meets with the President and tells him that the nation is under attack by zombies and the Aztec Mummy.  (It's a little unclear why he flies to Washington when the Mummy and his army of undead are in Mexico City, but this detail is never exactly explained.)The joint chiefs of staff are skeptical about the presentation made by the wrestler in his elaborate be-gemmed mask and tight leotards, but they give him 48 hours to destroy the Aztec Mummy.  Why?  And what will happen after the 48 hours?  These are imponderables.  Mil Mascaras has other tasks on his mind -- for instance, he has to fight several championship bouts, including a tag-team match.  In his last bout, the Mummy sends a zombie to inhabit the body of Mil's opponent and he almost loses the match.  Then, at a restaurant where Mil is celebrating his difficult victory, a waiter serves him psilocybin mushrooms as an appetizer.  Mil experiences a colorful psychedelic trip in the restaurant's toilet.  But he recovers and with the scientist and the Chief of Police of Mexico City, a comical African-American, Mil attacks the Aztec Mummy's stronghold.  The Mummy has kidnapped the Professor's daughter and there is a desperate battle between the Mummy with his undead army and Mils.  Just when things look the darkest, the Professor's Robot intervenes going mano et mano with the Mummy.  This provides only temporary respite.  The tide is finally turned when about eight other masked Mexican wrestles including Santo, the Blue Demon, "Hurricane" Ramirez and el Hijo de Santo (the son of Santo) join the attack. 

What makes this movie astonishing is that it was filmed entirely in Jefferson City, Missouri.  In some sequences, Mil and the grinning, half-witted Chief of Police stride through a spectacular palace -- it's apparently the Missouri State Capitol building, something that is obvious from the maps of Missouri hanging on the walls.  (Someone has draped a Mexican flag over a marble balustrade to show that this film is set in Mexico City.)  The two showpiece wrestling matches take place in small theaters with maybe forty spectators.  The Ozarks stand in for the Yucatan, although, of course, the Aztecs didn't live in the Yucatan which is, also, nowhere near Mexico City -- the Aztec Mummy's tomb is one of the pyramids at Tikal.  The film ignores major plot points but luxuriates in morose reveries about Mil's ancestors "being forced to wear the mask thousands of years ago."  Indeed, there are detailed scientific explanations provided for how Mil manages to change masks about every three minutes in the movie -- the Professor determines that the masks simply alter "genetically" clinging to Mil's face.  The film oozes machismo -- but it has weird interludes:  in one the Destructor, one of Mils opponents is lured into sexual encounter with a demon inhabiting the body of a beautiful woman:  when the wrestler realizes that he's just had sex with a male demon, he contorts his face as if he eating something very foul, indeed, these expressions concealed partially by his knobby insectoid mask.  Both the Aztec Mummy and Mil speak in bombastic, but extremely beautiful, mellifluous baritones.  Mils is unfailingly polite, generous and kind.  Somehow, he seems very courtly and gentlemanly even when he is bashing together the heads of his adversaries, including two lethal seductresses -- they are evil twins.  The movie is so down-and-out that it advertises as special guest stars Harley Race (who does the blow-by-blow on one of Mil matches) and P. J. Soles.  At one point, the Professor tells Mil:  "You have the mind of a scientist, the soul of an artist, the body of a great athlete, but I can't figure out what goes on behind that mask of yours."  Threatening the villainous mummy who has kidnapped the Professor's daughter to make her his bride, Mil says:  "My fist is the only bride fate has in store for you.  And the consummation shall be painful!"  The movie is garishly shot.  The backgrounds of every scene are tarted up with blue and red lights.  The Professor's daughter wears high gloss lipstick that glints lasciviously in the light.  The film's credits include not one but three "Nahuatl Advisors" and features "artifacts from the UMC Museum of Anthropology" -- presumably referring to the University of Missouri at Jeff City.  Mil Mascaras was 66 years old when the movie was made -- he still sometimes wrestles:  he is now 77.  The film was screened at Burning Man and has won just about every horror film award that exists. 

The Image Book

Jean-Luc Godard's Image Book (2019) is a fantastically complex collage of film clips, laconic aphorisms, enigmatic intertitles, and bits and pieces of accompanying music.  The film is 86 minutes long, but it will take you all your life, if you are so inclined, to watch, study, and understand.  Whether there is something in this film worth laboring over is not wholly clear to me.  This analysis must be regarded as purely provisional, preliminary, and incomplete -- indeed, there is something about the film that defeats any notion of a final analysis or last word on this movie.

Walter Benjamin speculated about the possibility of creating a work of art wholly derived from quotations from other works.  With the exception of a three or four minutes of new footage -- most notably some shots of Godard's fingers manipulating an editing machine to cut film -- every image in the picture comes from some other source.  (And, it may be, that the pictures of an old man's fingers laboriously operating a film editing machine come from other late movies by this director, possibly Goodbye to Language.)  A cineaste will recognize about half of the film sequences that comprise the movie -- I was able to identify, perhaps, a third of the footage. Godard's strategies in making this collage are so politically and thematically dense that knowing where the pictures originate adds an important dimension to the film -- but he doesn't annotate the images until the very end and, then, only incompletely.  On all levels the viewer, even if approaching the film with a generous heart, encounters obstacles -- in fact at the end of the movie Godard actually shows the chain-link fence and the daunting "no trespassing" sign with which Citizen Kane begins (as well as a similar sequence in some French film unknown to me).  The pictures zip by too fast to be contemplated -- you are always "catching up" to Godard's vertigo-inducting mélange of punning, multi-lingual (Joycean) subtitles, the pictures, and the aphoristic statements on the soundtrack that the pictures seemingly illustrate -- although I may have this backward, perhaps, the aphorisms illustrate the pictures.  The relationship between foreground and background information is perpetually shifting -- sometimes, it seems that the soundtrack is foreground; other times, the pictures are obviously more important than the words or music; most of the time a hierarchical relationship between the different ways that the film means simply is too complex too articulate.  Some of the pictures are horrific and leave a shadow darkening other images that are obviously light-hearted, fragments of movie musicals or comedies -- the range of emotions triggered by the images and the soundtrack is as broad as possible and this also disorients the viewer.  Finally, Godard's growled bearish asides on the soundtrack often seem to be gibberish -- he says something that is neatly balanced and aphoristic in structure, but you generally have no idea what he means or to what he is referring.  Hot-button political issues heave into view for a moment, but, then, are dismissed with dizzying rapidity.  The viewer's experience is one of playing "catch up, chasing a significance or paraphrase that remains always fugitive.  With these caveats, I make several observations:

First, Godard regards images as meaningless, without any significance, unless their context is defined somehow.  An image can have any number of meanings depending on the way it is used.  In the modern world, images are vorhanden -- that is, to use pheonomologial terms "on hand" to be used as equipment in the world.  The sense derives from Martin Heidegger.  Godard uses the concept of images being "on hand" as a kind of equipment (for either good or evil) by physically showing hands.  The emblematic image in the movie is a hand pointing skyward with fist clenched -- this image is extracted from a painting by Leonardo da Vinci.  The hand means that images are tools that can be manipulated (within the word "manipulated", we hear the world "hand" -- the mano in Spanish).  Godard calls the hand a "fairy with five fingers" and the notion of a hand-made film, a film that is manually constructed of images is central to the picture.  An image is without impact unless someone takes it in his or her hands.

The images of hands, particularly Leonard da Vinci's skyward-pointing finger and fist, punctuate the film and divide it into two parts.  After introducing the hand motif, Godard devises five sections, each of them enumerated and associated with a quotation or title.  The five sections equate to the hand's five fingers and may also have other thematic associations (for instance, the five senses) that I am unable to divine.  The five enumerated sequences, then, end in a hand-montage that signifies the principal division in the movie -- this division which occurs at about the half-way mark is between the essay-like thematic collages in the first point of the movie and, something, that is nominally narrative, that is, plotted in the film's second part.  The second half of The Image Book has an elliptical plot but also invokes imagery of the Middle East -- "Joyous Arabia" as a title tells us.  This imagery is avowedly "orientalist" to use Edward Said's notion that the West has constructed a series of caricatures and stereotypes of the Middle East that it, then, treats as politically accurate and, therefore, instrumental -- Godard's Arabia is palm fronds,  gorgeous calligraphy and the Koran, picturesque villages on the Mediterranean littoral, oasis palms and mud-brick houses, brightly colored paintings basking in the glorious sunshine, genies, harem girls, and, of course, terrorist (there are several images of horrific explosions).  At the conclusion of the "Joyous Arabia" sequence, Godard lists sources on a black title but the film doesn't end -- it has a deeply personal and moving coda, a l'envoi to the viewer and to the world of images.

The first section of the "five fingers" portion of The Image Book is entitled "Remakes".  This collage argues that we understand the world by using images to "remake" it.   There is no original or radically first perception of something -- we always see reality as a remake of some movie or TV show that we have earlier watched.  Images are continuously recycled.  The pictures cut together in this sequence include US soldiers interrogating a wounded Vietnamese girl (obviously a predicate for a similar scene in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket -- which Godard does not show.)  We see shots from Pasolini's Salo:  naked youths on leashes panting like dogs in front of their Fascist tormentors.  ISIS hurls prisoners into a canal; Kim Novak dives into the water in Vertigo but is saved by Jimmy Stewart.  Some girls get out of a taxi cab and approach the camera; in Murnau's Last Laugh some women are squired to a waiting taxi by Emil Jannings chivalrously holding an umbrella for them.  Sterling Haydn and Joan Crawford talk about lies and love in a clip from Johnny Guitar interrupted by empty frames of black.  Some patterns are visible -- for instance, Godard shows the harrowing end of Paisan with the Germans shoving the captured partisans into the Po River to rhyme this image with Kim Novak's plunge into the San Francisco bay and the ISIS executions (and possibly with Salo's portrait of atrocities and dying Vietnamese girl in what seems to be documentary footage), but it's also maddeningly obtuse and oblique.

The second finger is called "Le Soirees of St. Petersburg" and seems to be about images of war.  Indeed, the sequence begins with a famous shot from Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace, Natasha's first appearance, and, then, shows a ballroom sequence, cavalry charges, and battle scenes from that movie -- this imagery is heavily manipulated, much of it colorized with blinding oranges and blues leaking all over the screen.  We see little boys playing at war -- an image that will return at the end of the film in a different series of shots concluding "Joyous Arabia."  People are tortured. Bodies lie in heaps.  On the soundtrack, we hear citations from King Lear. (Cordelia is like the dying Vietnamese woman.)  A young woman is raped and speared, a shot from Mizoguchi's Ugetsu.  A man sits on the edge of a cold sea, back to us and holding a gun -- a dead woman is sprawled across the frame behind him.  War is one of film's great and perpetual subjects.  All war films remake one another.  At the end of sequence, we see rabbits gunned down in Renoir's Rules of the Game (the rabbit hunt scene) and a crocodile chases water-birds in a psychedelic-colored swamp -- nature also is war. 

The third finger is gentle and lyric -- it's a study of how trains have been used in films.  This is the most esthetically rewarding sequence of the movie and, in fact, I think it's a kind of masterpiece.  The first images in film history were Lumiere brothers Actualities showing trains pulling in to stations and Godard plays on all of the implications that trains have had for film and narrative:  we see Soviet armored trains (possibly from the movie Reds), corpses next to a train track, Nazi trains with gaunt, ghostly Jews peeping from them, Japanese triumphal trains, romantic partings in train stations, trains entering tunnels and ancient footage of trains thundering through great blizzards.  Westerns are mined for pictures of trains in the Southwestern deserts and gunslingers riding in passenger cars.  (Recall 3:10 to Yuma, a film that Godard doesn't cite).  Godard states his thesis in the middle of this section -- when something is no longer needed for survival it can become the subject of contemplation, that is, an art object.  (Trains no longer are wholly instrumental -- they are now sliding into becoming the subject of art.)  Godard reminds us that no citation is neutral:  "The words of Goethe," he says enigmatically, "become terrible when said on a small Russian railway" -- referring to some atrocity that I (fortunately) don't know (or, perhaps, an imaginary atrocity.)  The sequence ends with a glorious shot -- a man  trotting along side a train that is departing beyond a thicket of trees and brush.  The image is an elegy for every sequence in film history in which someone wistfully watched a train bearing away from them the object of their desires or carrying a young man toward his future destiny.  (For instance, the train at the end of I Vitelloni, not in this film -- my citation of these movies to which reference is not directly made in The Image Book shows how the picture works on the imagination:  it causes the viewer to supplement the collage on-screen with remembered images more significant to the viewer then the rather obscure stuff actually shown.)

The fourth finger is called "The Spirit of the Laws".  It's about law and violence, beginning with a riot scene from Peter Watkins' film on the Paris Commune, then, showing barricades, images of Montesquieu and his book, Henry Fonda as young Abe Lincoln reading the law in an idyllic meadow or by the river.  The law implies execution and we see Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc burned at the stake, the execution of Charles the First, Fonda as the tormented priest in The Wrong Man, and a sinister Judge in Dreyer's Day of Wrath.  Less obviously related to the theme of law and its execution are images of the Columbine shooting (from Gus van Sant's Elephant), men buried up to their necks in sand with horses thundering around from  Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico, an man using a switchblade to kill a woman that he loves, and a grinning pinhead from Freaks intercut with shots from a porno film.  Godard tells us that "Everything done in Europe is done by Europe" -- he cites his own Weekend for a shot of burning cars and corpses.  "All is grace", the country priest says in Bresson's film of the diary of such a priest, pronouncing one kind of law (and referring us back to Fonda in the Hitchcock movie) and, then, we see tanks rumbling through a shadowy, green forest. Where there is law there is virtue and terror -- rioters rush through the streets of Athens, a reprise of the Paris Commune images with which the sequence began.  With law comes cruelty and the knowledge of sin (perhaps, the meaning of Bresson - Bernanos reference).  But law is the foundation for human society.  A lawless society can't make films.

The fifth finger, named after Michael Snow's experimental film La Region Centrale, is the shortest and most poetic.  Snow set a mechanical device on a barren hilltop in northern Onatario and, then, attached a camera to the machine.  The machine was programmed to undertake various tracking, zooming, and rotating motions -- filming the hills and forests around the camera without human intervention.  Several minutes of the film are cited in The Image Book while Godard mutters about the extinction of the species.  He says that nonetheless "we must learn to love those capable of doing this." -- That is, destroying entirely our natural world and making extinct the animals that live with us in the wilds upon which we have encroached.  We see a woman's face.  In my view, the "central region" is the human heart -- the place from which originates both the mandate of love and the will to power that has destroyed nature around us. 

The movie is punctuated at this point with another montage of hands.  Then, "Joyous Arabia" begins.  This part of the film is actually an adaptation of a 1986 novel by the Egyptian writer Albert Cossery -- Cossery spent most of his life in Paris and wrote I French. Godard shows various paintings of Moroccan and Algerian scenes, then, haltingly narrates a story about a fictional country named Dofa, somewhere near the Persian Gulf, a place without oil and, therefore, of no interest to the United States.  Godard intends some kind of commentary on the so-called Arab Spring, the wave of revolutions that toppled rulers in the Maghraib.  But the story is very unclear and hard to follow:  it seems to involve a subversive organization rebelling against Ben Kedem, the country's ruler.  Ben Kedem's younger cousin is Samantar, who may support the rebels.  This part of the film contains several iconic shots of turbulent wildly blue seas, a home on the edge of the ocean where rebels seem to be plotting and an older man in a red fez, probably representing Ben Kedem.  The revolt against Ben Kedem fails despite some car bombings.  Godard intones:  Everyone wants to be King, no one wants to be Faust -- implying I think that Godard who has dispensed with King Lear in the earlier part of the film is like Faust, searching through the images of his youth, looking for a picture to which he will say:  Remain with me.  Thou art so fair.  But the restless nature of the film seems to show this as an impossibility.  As far as I can determine, Ben Kedem abdicates, confessing his crimes to Samantar. (The pictures of a beautiful young man who I took to be Samantar -- and who is, I think, an image for Samantar is actually Albert Cossery.) Samantar leads a "counter-revolution of children" using "dynamite discovered at the derrick".  We see boys running and leaping, playing at war, and a child rolling an ecstatically red hoop across the seaside dunes.  Revolution is now a children's game.

Here is where the film seems to end with another montage of hands.  But Godard isn't willing to let it go.  He cites Ann Mieville's book Image et Parole -- something like "for the world to be better... earth, abundance, letters which overload reality... we must listen."  (Godard supervised the English subtitles and he often translates statements made in French only in fragments -- this is in keeping with one the film's final citations:  "Brecht says 'only a fragment bears the mark of reality'.")  Godard's voice is increasingly hoarse.  He says that when "the I talks to myself, then, I produce the words of another."  The last sequence is intensely moving -- Godard cites Ophuls Le Plaisir (the first de Maupassant story "The Mask":  a man is dancing wildly with several young women.  The man wears a mask.  Suddenly, he whirls about and falls down.  One of the young women with whom he was dancing stares at him horrified -- her beautiful smitten image ends the film.  On the soundtrack Godard is making a phlegmy congested statement about "youth" and "ardent hope."  Godard doesn't show the next shot in Ophuls film -- someone removing the mask from the dying dancer to show that the bland, youthful disguise conceals an elderly man.  This is Godard's comment on this film and his relationship to it -- to live, he has told us, is to produce.  But the dance is now potentially fatal.  A mask turns us into an image but, one day, the mask must also must fall away.

Machorka-Muff

Jean Marie Straub, credited with directing Machorka-Muff (1963) describes the film in an opening creidt as "An Abstract Visual Dream -- not a Story."  In fact, the picture has a complex narrative -- whether you regard it as a "dream" or story or, most probably, a nightmare is probably immaterial.  But it's worth knowing what happens in the movie.

Machorka-Muff is German military officer, an alumnus of Hitler's Wehrmacht.  It would do disservice to the man to call him a Nazi.  He's something more ancient -- a German aristocrat, inbred and arrogant, the scion of a dynasty whose male family members have always made war, or preparations for war, their trade.  Machorka-Muff (MM as I'll call him) is trim, exquisitely groomed, handsome and articulate -- he's also a thorough-going cad as far as women are involved, something to be expected of an aristocrat of his pedigree.  He is a staunch old-fashioned Catholic as well, a Conservative, and, somewhat out of sorts since sidelined after the German defeat in the recent world war.  MM comes to Bonn at night, surveys the town from his hotel room, and, then, has what he terms a "capitol city dream" -- he sees himself approaching three eerily draped statues on featureless stone plinths.  When he pulls aside the drapery, MM sees that the figure represent him, wearing a new, freshly pressed general's uniform.  MM has come to deliver a speech at the laying of a cornerstone.  (A military academy is being constructed over the cornerstone.)  In the morning after his strange dream, an old army buddy comes to see MM.  MM speculates as to whether he can seduce his buddy's wife -- in a voice-over he tells us that he enjoys "petite bourgeois erotics."   A politician appears in the hotel.  The army buddy is dismissed -- the two men have been nostalgically enjoying old war stories:  MM recalls with glee how his brigade was down to only 13 men and, then, "(he) had to have four of them shot for mutiny."  Good times as far as these guys are concerned.  The politician suggests that MM will be made a general, a particular honor since this will occur "in a democracy."  MM has an assignation with a girlfriend.  He is so happy about the prospect of being made a general that he wanders joyfully around Bonn, looking at various advertisements and window-shopping. A montage interlude ensues showing articles in various German newspapers about Adenauer reinstituting the Wehrmacht -- various theologians are quoted to say that Christians make the best soldiers and that Jesus would not have hesitated to raise an army for self-defense.  His girlfriend picks him up in her convertible and they go somewhere to have sex.  MM tells us on the voice-over that his girlfriend has been married previously seven times -- these seven earlier marriages equate to his seven war wounds.  Another politician appears at the place where MM and his girlfriend are staying -- the man has brought a general's uniform, a resplendent garment that everyone admires.  MM goes to where the cornerstone is being laid and delivers an address -- the military academy will be named after Marshal Hinlanger-Hiss, a commander who was unfairly traduced after World War II.  Hitler, affectionately known as "the Tapir", denounced poor Hinlanger-Hess because in a disastrous battle the general lost only 8,000 men.  Hitler concluded that a valiant defense would have killed at least 12,000 soldiers.  MM states that he's researched the matter and now knows that Hinlanger-Hiss' battle destroyed no fewer that 14,500 soldiers thus demonstrating the Field Marshal's courage, valor, and prowess in spilling the blood of his troops.  This serves to vindicate Hinlanger-Hiss and the new military institute is named after him.  A sad-looking little brass band plays a patriotic song and the cornerstone is laid.  MM and his girlfriend, then, attend Mass.  The priest notes that since all of her previous marriages were Protestant, none of them really existed, and, so, she can now marry MM in a grand church wedding.  MM and his new wife, married for her 8th time, go on a honeymoon to the Bodensee. She remarks happily:  "This is how I always feel as a new bride."  Someone suggests that there is opposition to the new Wehrmacht general, MM.   MM's wife responds vehemently:  "No one dares to oppose our family."  The film cuts to black on those words and the movie is done. 

Here is the most remarkable thing:  this complicated narrative, based on a novella by Heinrich Boell is about 18 minutes long.  Two of those minutes are devoted to the montage showing newspaper articles about re-arming the Reich.  MM's speech about Hinlanger-Hiss takes up about a minute and a half. And there are long sequences involving quotidian activities such as MM tying his tie, shaving, and participating ritualistically in the ceremonies associated with laying the cornerstone of the military academy.  Straub and his partner, Danielle Huillet (also his wife) were as red as could be -- card-carrying Communists if such a thing existed and, in public appearances, they have always been associated with a sort of Red Army faction/ Baader-Meinhof extremism.  Indeed, Straub dedicated his ultra-austere film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach to "the peace-loving people of North Vietnam", categorically supporting "their struggle against American Imperialism".  Age didn't mellow him -- after the 9-11 attack on America, Straub told a crowd of reporters at Cannes that "there would never be enough terrorists in the world so long as there is a United States."  These sorts of pronouncements have a hysterical, irrational edge and, indeed, the plot in Machorka-Muff is grotesque to the point of absurdity.  But Straub and Huillet were also great filmmakers and the bizarre aspects intrinsic to Machorka-Muff are concealed, or moderated, by the exceedingly sober, documentary-style efficiency of this little film.  Straub doesn't emphasize his polemical points -- in fact, he cuts away from the juiciest stuff, leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions.  Unlike a director like Fassbinder or Terry Gilliam in a political film like Brazil, Straub eschews anything like melodrama.  His camera placement is always fanatically precise:  for instance, the camera looks down on Machorka-Muff when he reads his speech about Hinlanger-Hiss' prowess in getting his men killed -- there is a slight tincture of sardonic condescension in the way the camera is placed.  Straub uses a similarly high angle looking down on the pathetic military band and the equally inauspicious-looking corner stone, a nasty little box of brick in a muddy field.  The movie is intentionally materialistic -- there is no suggestion of anything like psychology:  people act exactly as we expect them to act:  stereotypes represent a kind of truth.  There is tiny cascade of mismatched close-ups when Machorka-Muff sees his new uniform -- the montage suggests joy so great as to be just slightly unhinged.  The scenes involving the dream, shot in high-contrast black and white, are undemonstratively surreal -- but the peculiarity of these images isn't dwelled-upon:  it's all the more surrealist for being matter-of-fact --Machorka-Muff isn't an imaginative man and the dream is only slightly interesting to him.  Indeed, given the short 18 minute running time, nothing is really emphasized or dramatized.  The editing is so sharp and exact as to be percussive -- you can feel the cuts in your belly.  Straub's materialism is dramatized by his use of actual newspaper articles, lovingly cut into a montage that is a bit demanding for a non-German reading viewer -- I could read the texts but not completely since the cuts are too quick to allow the person watching to study the print carefully (and the subtitles intervene to also block out some of the words.)  Other avowedly materialist aspects of the film are the de-dramatized, clinically lit TV-style locations, the advertisements in shop windows where Machorka-Muff lingers, and extended real-time scenes of him knotting his neck-tie or shaving or standing motionlessly as he reads his bizarre speech and testimonial in Hinlanger-Hiss.  The camera also lingers on the modest little corner stone -- not much of a monument to a bloodthirsty warrior whose exploits cost his army 14,500 men.  In the 1960's and early 1970's, there was an uncompromising Leftist opposition in Germany -- this opposition was so fierce that some of its exponents in the film world (particularly Volker Schloendorff and Fassbinder) couldn't exactly denounce the Baader-Meinhof gang for its depredations.  When Heinrich Boell, who wrote the novella on which the film is based, was asked what sort of monument to the German war dead he would endorse, he said that he would like there to be a plaque simply reading "Shit".  This is pretty extreme and Machorka-Muff is a testament to these cultural forces.