Seven Chances

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

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

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

Dream Scenario

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

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

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

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

The Love of Jeanne Ney (film group note)

 

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

Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs 

1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

4.

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

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

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

5.

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

The Naked Gun (2025)

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

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

L'Atlantide (1932)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecton

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charley Varrick

 Charley Varrick is a 1973 film noir directed by Don Siegel and starring Walter Matthau.  In the opening scenes, Matthau, who is leading a bank heist, appears in disguise -- however, the grey wig, moustache, and silver eyebrows are not even remotely adequate to disguise his weary, pug-ugly face. Matthau was usually cast as an avuncular middle-aged businessman and, in Charley Varrick, he plays against type, acting the part of a highly intelligent, ingenious and ruthless bank robber.  There's very little backstory and it's not clear what misadventures have led Varrick into this line of criminal enterprise -- he previously was employed as a barnstorming pilot who has retired from his carnival exploits into the trade of crop duster.  His unfortunate wife, killed in the opening shoot-out, was a wing-walker in his air shows.  The movie is a relic, produced after the golden era of the cheaply made B-movie film noir.  It endorses and enacts all of the cliches of the genre, is unpretentious and doesn't aspire to anything more than ninety minutes of engaging entertainment -- by the time the film was made noir had mostly migrated either to big ambitious psychological thrillers (like Polanski's Chinatown) or become a staple of network TV in the form of shows like Mannix and The Rockford Files.  Charley Varrick resembles the latter -- the movie has a charismatic leading man, an edge of  cynicism, but is, generally, family- friendly:  no one curses, the violence is mostly off-screen, and the sex is primarily a matter of ribald innuendo.  Varrick's crop-dusting business alleges that its employees are "the Last of the Independents", but this slogan isn't really thematic and the movie doesn't explore the hero's independence.  Typical for Siegel, the film is very well-written and carefully constructed; the narrative is clear and all elements work together in a satisfying manner.  Characterizations are broad, even cartoonish.  The action scenes are very crisp and well-staged and, certainly, not over-the-top or ridiculously exaggerated as if often the case today.  The thrust of the film is that the unpretentious Varrick is smarter than all of his adversaries and figures out clever ruses to achieve his objectives.  The exception to this rule is the rather dim-witted penny-ante bank robbery with which the film begins -- one wonders how the cool and cunning Varrick got hoodwinked into this enterprise.  But the bank heist is transparently a plot device, just something to put the story in motion.

With his wife (the wing-walker) driving the getaway car, Varrick and a dullard sidekick, apparently employed at his crop-dusting business, stage an armed robbery of a podunk bank in a podunk town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in northeast New Mexico.  The robbery goes awry and two cops are killed; two bandits who are thrown into the movie as cannon fodder -- we never even see their faces -- are also gunned-down.  Varrick and his henchman drive into the hills where the hero's wife dies of a gunshot wound.  Varrick is a survivor and casually callous.  He sets a bomb on fuse and blows up the getaway car and his dead wife with it -- this sequence is important in establishing that Varrick has skills with high explosives.  The money stolen in the heist, predictably, turns out to be laundered funds in a huge sum (about $750,000) owned by the Mafia.  The mob's factotum in Albuquerque is a corrupt banker played by John Vernon -- Vernon, who appeared in Peckinpah movies, was a "go-to" actor for roles involving crooked and malign businessmen.  Vernon's evil banker contacts of mob enforcer whose name is "Molly" -- this is much to the amusement of the other hoods and hookers, until Molly (played by the chubby Joe Don Baker) beats them senseless.  Molly, like most villains of his ilk, is given a good vocabulary and smokes a pipe, a instrumentality that he also uses to rap on doors.  (The pipe is a sort of trademark like the benzedrine inhaler that Richard Widmark uses in Kiss of Death).  Molly pursues Varrick and his sidekick; he's relentless and sadistic as befits his profession.  The cops play next to no role in the movie which, after the first half hour, becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Varrick and Molly.  Various people get tortured and killed and there's a final showdown in which Molly's pick-up truck is pitted against Varrick's fragile-looking biplane crop duster.  (This scene bears some remote resemblance to the climax of Siegel's Border Incident involving death by farm cultivator).  Molly is the kind of guy who uses whorehouses as motels, virtuously announcing that he doesn't sleep with prostitutes -- this seems to dismay the girls.  When he has to spend a few hours with a moll who forges passports, he whiles away the time by having sex with her, efficiently punching her in the face as foreplay -- she responds with a sloppy wet kiss and by groping him.  The film has a sort of curdled residue of the "swinging sixties" -- even Matthau gets a sex scene, although he plays it for laughs, involving John Vernon's mistress and her perfectly circular fuck-pad bed.  (The woman asks Matthau for more sex announcing that they haven't yet done it "South by Southwest" in the compass-shaped bed -- the reference is obviously to the crop-dusting scene in North by Northwest.)  There's a bawdy old lady who sings dirty songs and is a snoop.  The dialogue references Clint Eastwood, another inside joke since Siegel's work with Eastwood in Dirty Harry is, perhaps, the director's most famous film. Siegel himself appears in a cameo as a hardware store clerk who sells Varrick a fuse, timer, and some sticks of dynamite -- prices were very reasonable in the early seventies:  the entire explosive package costs 9 dollars and Varrick pays with a ten, getting change from the clerk.   (I may be mistaken on this ID; according to internet sources Siegel appears as a man playing ping pong in the basement of a Chinese restaurant that is also a mob den.  The film features some nonchalantly racist slurs -- a Jew is called a "bagel snapper" -- of the Archie Bunker All in the Family sort.)

Charley Varrick was critically praised but sunk like a stone at the box office.  It's more highly regarded in England and Europe than in the United States.  It's very good but forgettable since it cleaves so closely to film noir conventions -- I am unable to distinguish one film noir from another:  they are all more or less the same and, as Andy Warhol said about cokes, all good.  Charley Varrick is a little better than the average, elevated by the character actors and Matthau's rather somnolent, but effective, performance.