Argentine director Lucrecia Martel isn't interested in landscape or décor -- she frames her actors in very tight close-ups without establishing shots and, ordinarily, we have to construe their location from almost subliminal clues at the edge of the frame. However, her 2008 film, The Headless Woman, begins with a sequence that is an exception to this rule: we see boys playing with a dog, quarreling, and jumping in and out of a big concrete-lined trough of a drainage ditch, much of this filmed in medium to long shot. We see a dusty landscape, some battered roadside signs that serve as gymnasium equipment for the impoverished kids playing in the deep concrete channel; a gravel road winds along the side of the ditch, tracking its course. This sequence is, in fact, one that establishes a landscape vital to the enigma posed by the film. An upper middle-class woman, Vero, is driving home along this gravel road, apparently a short-cut to the suburb where she lives in Salto in Argentina's northwest province -- the area is on the Bolivian border. Vero is unapologetically vain and self-centered: she has dyed her hair platinum-blonde, an unbecoming "look" on her to be honest and has been chatting with others of her class about building some kind of swimming pool for the country club to which she belongs. On the short-cut, while answering her cell-phone, Vero hits some thing (or some things) -- there are two hard impacts, she bangs her head on windshield, and, in the rear view mirror, sees a dog lying dead on the gravel road next to the deep drainage ditch. But there are also little handprints on her side window: were those made by the children playing around her car at the country club or did she hit one of the boys playing with the dog, knocking him off the roadway into the ditch? Although the evidence is ambiguous due to the topography of the accident scene -- Vero doesn't get out of the car until later, when a torrential downpour occurs flushing out the ditch -- Martel's heroine comes to conclude that she has killed someone in a hit-and-run accident.
Vero is disoriented by the crash and suffered minor head trauma. The world seems strange to her and alien. Martel's technique makes it very difficult to work out relationships between people in Vero's milieu -- are the women around her cousins? There are two men who look, more or less, alike -- both of them grope her affectionately. One of these men is her husband and the other seems to be a doctor who is her brother --but I never could construe which was which. (Martel's vision of Argentine family life, at least in Salto, involves lots of intimate contact that makes it difficult for a Gringo viewer to figure out who is a lover and who is merely a close friend or family member.) Everyone in the film seems precariously poised on the brink of dementia. An elderly Aunt named Lala sees people who are long-dead and says that Vero's voice has become "strange" -- when she warns Vero about the dead inhabiting the house, we see out-of-focus a brown-skinned Indian boy, similar to the kids playing by the ditch. Is this a ghost or just one of the children of the various identically brown-skinned Indian servants who seem to work for the family? Spooky events occur. The water fails at home or runs rusty in a hotel -- a weird flash startles the viewer until we see that someone is welding in a closet in Vero's house (apparently fixing the pipes). People stare in horror at Vero's damaged car but we never see what they are looking at. Vero's husband inexplicably brings some sort of dead animal to the house -- it looks like a dog but is perhaps a goat -- and tells the maid to hose it down before skinning it. A gardener digging in Vero's lawn discovers that some kind of pool or fountain is buried in the soil. When Vero goes back to the hospital, presumably to get her x-rays so that there will be no trace of her being seen after the accident, she finds that her brother has already purged the record. After the crash, she stayed at a hotel in the city; but there is no record of that visit either. In the end, Vero who is a dentist sees poor children at a city school and schedules them for dental treatment. Then, with the two men, she goes to the hotel and there is some kind of celebration.
The Headless Woman is clearly about a divide between the classes in Argentina and a parable about the desaparecidos ("the disappeared ones") killed during the military dictatorship. The narcissistic and heedless Vero is not a bad person, just someone who is indifferent to others. The Argentine vice is not necessarily malign cruelty but negligence and forgetfulness. When Vero finds herself in a slum near the place where she has lived all her life, she panics and can't find her way out of the maze of dirt lanes and concrete-block huts -- the camera watches over her shoulder as she drives in the slum, its streets crowded, and we have sickening feeling that she is going to run someone else down. Indeed, Martel is a master of suggesting the imminence of a bad accident -- we are always waiting for the motorcycle to slide out of control or the child to drown in the pool or the gardener to fall off his ladder -- this sense of impending casualty was Martel's trademark in La Cienaga, her first film, a picture that also exploited a swimming pool as a symbol of upper class privilege. The cruel truth shown in The Headless Woman is that no one cares if Vero ran over a slum kid and that everyone is complicit in making this inconvenient fact vanish.
Compared to La Cienaga and The Holy Girl, I thought The Headless Woman was a bit like its middle-aged heroine -- a bit skinny, too self-involved, and too slender to bear the weight of meaning imposed on its (almost) non-existent story. The film confirms Martel's technical brilliance and demonstrates her complete control over the material. I just wish the material was a little more substantive.
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Saturday, July 4, 2015
La Nina Santa (The Holy Girl)
Reliable sources aver that there is a genre of Japanese pornography devoted to subway frottage -- that is, men rubbing against female commuters crammed into underground trains at rush hour. In those films, the victim of the frotteur sometimes develops an affection for her assailant and the couple continue their kinky games at home happily ever after. Lucrecia Martel's The Holy Girl is an Argentinian film on the same general subject, not pornography but something considerably more complex, disturbing, and mysterious. Indeed, Martel's 2004 movie turns on several incidents of frottage, both consensual and non-consensual. Amalia is a teenage girl who lives in a hotel with her divorced mother and uncle -- the two adults manage the hotel, a dismal-looking establishment that clearly has seen better days. Amalia attends youth group meetings at the Catholic church and is very pious. With her friend, Josefina, she is encouraged to discover her religious vocation. Unfortunately, Amalia decides that her vocation will be to seduce and, therefore, save the soul of a geeky-looking doctor attending a medical conference at the hotel. Amalia is obsessed with this doctor because, one afternoon, he pressed his genitals against her buttocks surreptitiously while she was watching a musician demonstrate the use of the theremin (playing Bach's "Sheep may safely graze.") When the doctor commits this frottage a second time, Amalia takes hold of his hand, reversing the relationship of power, and causing the skinny, balding and bespectacled doctor to flee from her. As it happens, Amalia's lonely mother is also flirting with the frotteur, the unlovely and nerdish Dr. Jano, who has asked her to appear in a skit in the closing session of the medical seminar. Dr. Jano is skittish about advances by Helena, Amalia's mother, a former champion diver whom the doctor has admired (and had a crush on) since he was a teenager. He invites his wife and their children to attend the last day of the seminar and, then, learns to his horror that the girl against whom he has pressed himself is the innkeeper's daughter. Amalia's best friend, the somewhat horse-faced and sexually aggressive, Josefina, has a boyfriend -- she allows her boyfriend to masturbate by rubbing himself against her panty-clad buttocks. When she is caught in bed with this boy, Josefina shifts attention away from her transgressions by telling her parents that Amalia has been sexually molested by "a doctor at the convention." The parents, ignoring Josefina's pleas that they don't disclose this event, storm the hotel and, while Jano and Helena are performing their skit on-stage, self-righteously prepare to accuse the physician of child-molesting. Meanwhile, Josefina and Amalia swim together in the hotel's dilapidated and noisome-looking pool, two nymphets both aware, but also blissfully unconcerned, with the havoc that they have created.
Lucrecia Martel is an important film maker. Her initial movie, La Cienaga (2001) was acclaimed as instituting something of a renaissance in Argentine cinema. Martel has a very distinctive style: she films almost entirely in close-up and steadfastly refuses to employ anything like an establishing shot or, even, a middle-distance shot to establish context. The audience must infer where people are located by the dialogue and slight cues in the bits of décor visible in the images. Similarly, Martel eschews ordinary exposition -- we have to work out the relationship between the parties from very confusing and ambiguous evidence. For instance, Helena is often show in intimate contact with a disheveled older man named Freddy, the general manager of hotel. She combs Freddy's hair, picks lice out of his locks, and, often, lies in bed, albeit fully clad with the man. In several scenes, there is a distinct sexual tension between Helena and Freddy -- but, it turns out, that Freddy is Amalia's uncle, and probably Helena's brother (although he might be her ex-brother-in-law). A censorious older woman named Mirta broods over the action; I think she is Helena's ex-husband's mother -- and it may be that Helena and Freddy have acquired the rundown hotel as part of a divorce settlement, although this is merely surmise on my part. The movie features scenes on the streets of Saltos, a provincial city in northwest Argentina, sequences in a Catholic church, as well as the majority of the film shot in the hotel -- but we don't really see any of these places; the camera sticks resolutely to the faces of the characters. (The hotel is a remarkable location, spooky and decrepit, with a dismal-looking swimming pool -- apparently built around a hot spring -- and dark Victorian galleries and rooms. The DVD of the film comes with " making of" featurette showing just how atmospheric and Gothic the hotel is -- but Martel is so preternaturally disciplined that she doesn't ever use her camera to explore the hotel or its shabby garden environs. We have to infer its appearance and ambience from bits and pieces of image, fragments of corridors and meeting rooms and small claustrophobic bed rooms, glimpsed at the edge of her film-frames crowded with close-up faces.) As in La Cienaga, most of the characters spend all of their time lounging around in bed -- groups of people sharing a bed is a motif in Martel's films. Sometimes, Martel's camera is so close to the action that we see only parts of bodies, a shoulder or an arm or belly. Even when the camera goes outdoors -- in the Saltos streets or when the girls go to a scary accident scene in the country -- the camera stays within 18 inches of the people portrayed. As a result of this film-making style, most of the action occurs outside of the frame and is known to the viewer only by offscreen sounds. A good example is a close-up showing adolescent girls suddenly wide-eyed with fear that, then, becomes obsessive interest -- a drunk man has fallen from a balcony and is staggering around naked outside the window on the ground floor. We see him for only a second. One of the girl's says: "He's already dead. This is just muscle spasms." The viewer has no idea where the man came from or how he fell or who he is -- his appearance is as mysterious to the audience as it is to the bemused girls whose shock seques into prurient interest in his nudity. In another scene, a girl stumbles upon something that she identifies as a severed "hand" -- there is much screaming and running in circles, but we never see the source of the girl's alarm. In the film's final shot, we hear water rushing, a sound that seems to symbolize the girl's sexual prowess, their ability to control the lives of the adults around them with their newly discovered sexuality. But we don't know the source of the water. (The "making of" featurette shows that the "hot pool" or thermal bath periodically refills from water cascading into the pool -- but this source of the cascading sound is not shown in the movie itself.) Martel's actors are beyond reproach. Amalia has a crooked, inquisitive smile and she bares her teeth when she looks at Janos. Janos is certainly not anyone's ideal of an object of obsessive sexual desire -- an aspect of the film that makes it all the more mysterious. (Amalia thinks she is saving Janos' soul by attempting to seduce him.) The beautiful, frustrated Helena is fascinating -- she is played by an Argentine movie star whom the camera clearly loves. And Amalia's friend, Josefina, exudes a kind of raw polymorphous sexuality -- she maintains that she is pure, although she allows her boyfriend to masturbate against her, and she seems to have lesbian inclinations as well, repeatedly kissing Amalia on the mouth. Josefina is not conventionally attractive, but her demeanor and her sex-obsessed teasing make her intensely, and dangerously, seductive. Martel's intent seems to be to convey to the viewer a sultry close-up of female adolescent desire -- and the film has a curious confined and feline hothouse quality. The Holy Girl confirms my view that Martel is one of the most interesting film maker's working today.
Lucrecia Martel is an important film maker. Her initial movie, La Cienaga (2001) was acclaimed as instituting something of a renaissance in Argentine cinema. Martel has a very distinctive style: she films almost entirely in close-up and steadfastly refuses to employ anything like an establishing shot or, even, a middle-distance shot to establish context. The audience must infer where people are located by the dialogue and slight cues in the bits of décor visible in the images. Similarly, Martel eschews ordinary exposition -- we have to work out the relationship between the parties from very confusing and ambiguous evidence. For instance, Helena is often show in intimate contact with a disheveled older man named Freddy, the general manager of hotel. She combs Freddy's hair, picks lice out of his locks, and, often, lies in bed, albeit fully clad with the man. In several scenes, there is a distinct sexual tension between Helena and Freddy -- but, it turns out, that Freddy is Amalia's uncle, and probably Helena's brother (although he might be her ex-brother-in-law). A censorious older woman named Mirta broods over the action; I think she is Helena's ex-husband's mother -- and it may be that Helena and Freddy have acquired the rundown hotel as part of a divorce settlement, although this is merely surmise on my part. The movie features scenes on the streets of Saltos, a provincial city in northwest Argentina, sequences in a Catholic church, as well as the majority of the film shot in the hotel -- but we don't really see any of these places; the camera sticks resolutely to the faces of the characters. (The hotel is a remarkable location, spooky and decrepit, with a dismal-looking swimming pool -- apparently built around a hot spring -- and dark Victorian galleries and rooms. The DVD of the film comes with " making of" featurette showing just how atmospheric and Gothic the hotel is -- but Martel is so preternaturally disciplined that she doesn't ever use her camera to explore the hotel or its shabby garden environs. We have to infer its appearance and ambience from bits and pieces of image, fragments of corridors and meeting rooms and small claustrophobic bed rooms, glimpsed at the edge of her film-frames crowded with close-up faces.) As in La Cienaga, most of the characters spend all of their time lounging around in bed -- groups of people sharing a bed is a motif in Martel's films. Sometimes, Martel's camera is so close to the action that we see only parts of bodies, a shoulder or an arm or belly. Even when the camera goes outdoors -- in the Saltos streets or when the girls go to a scary accident scene in the country -- the camera stays within 18 inches of the people portrayed. As a result of this film-making style, most of the action occurs outside of the frame and is known to the viewer only by offscreen sounds. A good example is a close-up showing adolescent girls suddenly wide-eyed with fear that, then, becomes obsessive interest -- a drunk man has fallen from a balcony and is staggering around naked outside the window on the ground floor. We see him for only a second. One of the girl's says: "He's already dead. This is just muscle spasms." The viewer has no idea where the man came from or how he fell or who he is -- his appearance is as mysterious to the audience as it is to the bemused girls whose shock seques into prurient interest in his nudity. In another scene, a girl stumbles upon something that she identifies as a severed "hand" -- there is much screaming and running in circles, but we never see the source of the girl's alarm. In the film's final shot, we hear water rushing, a sound that seems to symbolize the girl's sexual prowess, their ability to control the lives of the adults around them with their newly discovered sexuality. But we don't know the source of the water. (The "making of" featurette shows that the "hot pool" or thermal bath periodically refills from water cascading into the pool -- but this source of the cascading sound is not shown in the movie itself.) Martel's actors are beyond reproach. Amalia has a crooked, inquisitive smile and she bares her teeth when she looks at Janos. Janos is certainly not anyone's ideal of an object of obsessive sexual desire -- an aspect of the film that makes it all the more mysterious. (Amalia thinks she is saving Janos' soul by attempting to seduce him.) The beautiful, frustrated Helena is fascinating -- she is played by an Argentine movie star whom the camera clearly loves. And Amalia's friend, Josefina, exudes a kind of raw polymorphous sexuality -- she maintains that she is pure, although she allows her boyfriend to masturbate against her, and she seems to have lesbian inclinations as well, repeatedly kissing Amalia on the mouth. Josefina is not conventionally attractive, but her demeanor and her sex-obsessed teasing make her intensely, and dangerously, seductive. Martel's intent seems to be to convey to the viewer a sultry close-up of female adolescent desire -- and the film has a curious confined and feline hothouse quality. The Holy Girl confirms my view that Martel is one of the most interesting film maker's working today.
Friday, July 3, 2015
John Wick
I have a suggestion for supernumerary henchmen assigned supporting roles in Ninja-style attacks on professional assassins: When the first six or so of your cohort have been slaughtered by the target of your attack, surviving assailants should give up the effort, put away their weapons and Ninja accoutrements and silently slink away. I presume that henchman-work is not well-paid, probably less than 20 dollars an hour, and with lousy, or no benefits -- accordingly, when your victim kills a half-dozen or so of your compatriots, it is the better part of valor to withdraw from the job. I always salute the heroism, albeit misplaced, of those nameless gang members who manfully continue the assault after its target has already rubbed-out the first half-dozen members of the team -- you want to shout out: "Dude! It's not worth it! Just go home!" But, of course, in films like John Wick (2014), professional responsibility trumps discretion: the killers just keep coming, one after another, pure cannon fodder for the homicidal hero who blithely wipes out the whole crew and, then, calls a corpse disposal service, identifies "dinner reservations for 12" (the number of his victims) and sits down the read the newspaper -- he can't smoke a cigarette because this would send a bad message to the young -- while awaiting the clean-up workers. John Wick is so ludicrously violent that it amusing until the number of murders reaches several hundred; at that point, even the most hardened action fan will find himself (or herself) jaded by the ongoing carnage. There's no film here -- just a series of fight scenes in which Keanu Reeves dispatches armies of attacking bad guys. The action is effectively choreographed but there is nothing remotely realistic about the interminable bloodbath comprising the last three-quarters of the film and, of course, the movie develops zero suspense -- it is obvious that John Wicks, the hyper-efficient assassin central to this film, is immortal and utterly impervious to injury: his bullets always hit their target with unerring accuracy while the hail of gunfire in which he pirouettes and whirls is uniformly unavailing, a thousand bullets don't succeed so much as scratching his face or mussing his hair. A couple times, he falls thirty or forty feet -- no problem, an ice-pack on the shoulder will ameliorate any symptoms from that mishap. Wounded in the side, Wicks either gets a colleague to do a little impromptu surgery employing expensive booze as an anesthetic or does the fix-up work himself using a veterinary staple-gun. Wicks is so tough that in the climactic duel to the death, he distracts his hapless enemy by using a dagger to stab his own belly thereby so perplexing the villain that the blade, withdrawn from the hero's guts, can be used to pierce the bad guy's throat. All of this grisly action is shot in near dark; the editing is crisp and the action scenes staged effectively within the shot. The montage, however, doesn't establish any larger context for the violence and so the movie is a series of four to five second shots showing Reeves butchering between two and three bad guys per set-up -- he uses his revolver as a club and firearm simultaneously, beating down the attacking henchmen while also shooting them at close-range. There are a few witty ideas in the film: the assassins are members of an exclusive guild and all stay at the same deluxe hotel in downtown Manhattan -- they are forbidden to kill one another on the premises. The killers pay for their expensive rooms and cocktails with gold coins and have their own homicide-lounge, a bar qua disco where they can relax with some orgiastic dancing to metal-rave music. Willem Defoe has a supporting role and seems much too old for the balletic violence in which he is involved: he also gets torturued a bit, although nothing compared to the hard use that he suffered as Our Lord in The Passion of the Christ. Reeves looks mean and glowers a lot but most of the time he is just spinning and twirling, a blur of motion, as he kills dozens of assailants at a time. Periodically, the director will punctuate the carnage with cliché images of Manhattan's skyline filmed from a sinister overhead angle -- completely pointless interpolations in the ongoing blood bath. You can't watch a picture like this without forming the treasonous desire to see John Wicks killed -- I find myself always rooting that the eighth or tenth or thirtieth anonymous henchman will put a bullet right through the hero's preening skull. But, alas, no such luck. The Wikipedia entry on this minor film, a picture that I don't recall even opening where I live, is longer than the write-up on Citizen Kane or Vertigo and, I must say, far more enthusiastic as to the merits of the film. I am probably failing to appreciate this film's merits -- it certainly has a number of highly vociferous fans.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Salvatore Giuliano (Film Group Essay)
Salvatore Giuliano is an Italian film released in 1962 and directed by Francesco Rosi. The movie is dramatized investigative journalism. Imagine All the President’s Men, not as film version of a book by journalists, but, instead, as a movie that itself, actually, embodies the journalistic inquiry. In Salvatore Giuliano, Rosi explores the historical circumstances leading to the death of the famous Sicilian bandit, the eponymous (if mostly unseen) protagonist of the film. Rosi shot the movie in the actual locations of the events depicted. Furthermore, with the exception to two professional actors, everyone else in the film is non-professional. The characters in this film are, in fact, actual Sicilian peasants, mafia members, and members of the military or carabinieri. In effect, Rosi has these people reprise roles they played in real life ten to fifteen years before the picture was made.
As investigative journalism, Salvatore Giuliano has a different status than most other films. The purpose of the movie is to unmask corruption previously concealed and tell a story that had been falsified by public officials and media. Salvatore Giuliano is not just a film, accordingly, but, also, a historical event in its own right, the revelation to Italian audiences of Sicilian corruption not known to most people living in the metropolitan centers of the "north" – that is, Rome and other places closer to the European mainland.
Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s "twelve best films of all time." Francis Ford Coppola, who shot parts of Godfather II and III, in Sicily hails Salvatore Giuliano as "the greatest Mafia movie ever made." Until the picture’s release on DVD by Criterion, the movie was completely unknown in the United States. It was never theatrically released in this country. The film is so intensely specific to Italian, and, particularly, Sicilian history and politics that it was widely, and, probably, correctly understood, to have no interest to most American audiences. By contrast, Rosi’s films, including Salvatore Giuliano, are well-known in Europe and the director is regarded as one of the most important of all Italian film makers.
Francesco Rosi
Francesco Rosi was born in 1922 in Naples. He was raised in a comfortable middle-class environment. In the late forties, Rosi lived in Rome where he worked as an illustrator of children’s books. (Like Fellini, Rosi began his career as a cartoonist; Rosi’s father also dabbled in satirical cartoons and, in fact, was almost jailed by Mussolini for an insulting caricature.) Rosi assisted Luchino Visconti in his film La Terra Trema, an important neo-realist picture made in Sicily. It was on location for that film that Rosi decided that he wanted to make movies.
In the fifties, Rosi worked as an assistant director on a number of movies. He also directed two mafia-themed crime pictures. Salvatore Giuliano was his third picture, won the Silver Bear award at Berlin, and brought Rosi to the attention of the European cinema community. A box-office and critical success in Italy, Salvatore Giuliano opened the door to Rosi making bigger budget (and more conventional) films with "bankable" movie stars. He followed Salvatore Giuliano with an equally uncompromising film investigating corruption in the building industry in post-war Palermo, Hands Across the City. The film starred Rod Steiger in the hope that the picture would find an international audience – in fact, the movie played in the United States only for a couple of showings in Little Italy in New York City.
Rosi made many other films, almost all of them unknown in this country and unavailable on DVD or otherwise. There’s no point listing movies that you can’t see. I will content myself with observing that Rosi won the Palm d’Or at Cannes with The Mattei Affair (1972) another movie about political corruption. His last picture, The Truce, adapts a memoir by Primo Levi and starred John Turturro – it was made in 1997.
Rosi died in 2015 at the age of 92. At the Berlin Film Festival, his horrific anti-war film, Many Wars Ago (1970) was screened. In his later films, Rosi gravitated toward literature and adapted several well-known books to the screen, chief among them Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987), and a film version of Leonardo Sciascia’s crime novel, Illustrious Cadavers (1976).
I have seen Rosi’s film version of Carlo Levi’s memoir Christ stopped at Eboli as well as his film about bullfighting, The Moment of Truth (1965), the director’s first color film. I have also watched Hands Across the City. Christ stopped at Eboli is beautifully made and adapted, but seems to require knowledge of Italian politics and folkways that I don’t have. Hands Across the City is a muckraking study of corruption – after an extraordinary beginning involving the collapse of a poorly built and subcode apartment building, the film loses me in its incredibly detailed chronicle of corruption and bid-rigging trials in Palermo. The Moment of Truth is probably an excellent film, but its subject matter is repugnant to me and the movie is, almost, unbearably brutal and gory – animals were definitely harmed in the production of this bullfighting film. Based on these movies, it is apparent to me that Rosi was a film maker with exceptional gifts. At Berlin, it was said that he made his camera an instrument for the "moral dissection of the truth." One commentator says that Rosi’s "engaged cinema" embodies the Italian Marxist, Gramsci’s slogan: "Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the Will."
No doubt exists that Rosi’s films have been very influential in Italy. Paolo Sorrentino’s picture about the "Black Pope," Giulio Andreotti, Il Divo, (2008) is unthinkable without the examples of Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Across the City. Similarly, Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous neo-realist film about the Algerian insurgency, The Battle of Algiers (1967) is shot and edited like Salvatore Giuliano.
The real Salvatore Giuliano
The motives and character of the Sicilian bandit, Salvatore Giuliano, remain controversial to this day. The Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawn, opined that Giuliano was the last of the "people’s bandits" – that is, a figure like Robin Hood who redressed wrongs in semi-feudal Sicily. Others argue that Giuliano was a vicious thug and murderer, the engineer of an infamous massacre in which four children were shot dead. Some writers believe that Giuliano was a hapless victim of political circumstances much too vast and complex for him to understand. Michael Stern, a journalist who met the theatrical Giuliano in 1947, said that he seemed to be "Errol Flynn playing Pancho Villa."
Giuliano was born in 1922 in Montelepre, a village about twenty miles to the west of Palermo in the Sicilian mountains. He was a good student, but left high school when he was 13 to begin trafficking in olive oil. His father was drafted into service with the Italian armies fighting alongside Germany. Sicily, always poor, became more impoverished during World War II. Furthermore, chaos erupted in Sicily in July 1943 when the Allies invaded the island. Prior to the invasion, the Allies had urged Sicilians, who had only a loose affiliation with the rest of Italy, to revolt against both Berlin and Rome. Indeed, some elements of Sicilian society were in perpetual insurgency against Rome – these were people associated with the Mafia in alliance with the feudal landed aristocracy. (In Sicily, the Mafia is traditionally associated with right-wing politics, the peasantry, and Catholicism.) Accordingly, the Allies encouraged the Mafia, and other right-wing elements, to assist their invading forces.
With war raging in Sicily, the economy collapsed. Food was scarce and trading on the black market at extortionate prices. The United States military command deputized local Mafia chieftains to restore order by enacting rough justice on shopkeepers and other merchants who charged their customers black market prices. Salvatore Giuliano was caught in this turbulence. On September 2, 1943, Giuliano was stopped at a road block. He was apparently smuggling grain, possibly for sale on the black market. Although the circumstances are disputed, the 21-year old Giuliano was involved in an altercations with one of the carabiniere at the road block and killed the man. (Some sources say that he shot the carabiniere in the back). Giuliano, then, did what Sicilian outlaws have done since ancient times – he retreated into the mountains to hide-out.
A drag-net was instituted to hunt Giuliano. People were rounded-up and interrogated and members of Giuliano’s family were arrested. As the United States was to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan, these measures simply increase local hostility to the occupying police forces. In Sicily, hostility was further exacerbated by the fact that the occupation employed local Fascist police, carabiniere, and politicians to enforce its laws. Many of these people were already despised by the peasantry and the Mafia and, so, the situation was rife for civil conflict. On January 30, 1944, Giuliano with some compatriots staged a daring jail break at Monreal, a mountain suburb of Palermo. Giuliano’s men freed eight prisoners who became the nucleus of the bandit’s gang.
Many of Giuliano’s exploits prior to the Portella della Gineste massacre were famous in Sicily and, in fact, throughout Italy. Giuliano enforced fair prices for food in the Montelepre area, beating and, even, killing storeowners who overcharged their customers. He used extortion to compel redistribution of land in some districts where his forces were powerful. His most famous exploit was a burglary committed on the estate of a local Duchess, the Duchess of Pratemeno. Giuliano, with his henchmen, entered the woman’s estate, confronted her, and, after chivalrously kissing her hand, demanded that the woman surrender all of her jewelry. When she refused, Giuliano threatened to kidnap her children and she relented. The bandit took a diamond ring from the woman’s hand, the ring that he was wearing when killed in 1950. He also borrowed from her a copy of John Steinbeck’s novel, In Dubious Battle. After reading the book, he returned it to her with a polite note of thanks. These kinds of picturesque details lent a patina of glamor to Giuliano’s crimes – mostly garden-variety kidnapings for ransom and extortion. As a kidnapper, Giuliano was exquisitely courteous, treated his victims to their favorite meals, and took pride in not inflicting any injury on anyone. Giuliano’s fame was enhanced by his American connections – he was said to be friends with Italian-American gangsters – and his movie-star good looks.
In April 1945, Giuliano announced his support for the Sicilian separatism, a political movement accidentally unleashed by American support for the Mafia and right-wing monarchists as allies against the Germans (and Rome) during the war. Giuliano cloaked some of his depredations in the flag of Sicilian independence and was, in fact, granted a military commission in the putative new nation’s army. At this time, Giuliano commanded a group of insurgents estimated at about 60 men. His lieutenant was Gaspara Pisciotta, Giuliano’s first cousin, and a war hero. Pisciotta had been captured by the Germans while fighting against them and, after release from prison, joined Giuliano in his support of Sicilian independence. Pisciotta is a key figure in the story of Giuliano and, in fact, later confessed to killing his cousin in the Viterbo trial over the Portella della Ginestra massacre. Pisciotta was also very handsome and there are many pictures showing the two beautiful men together.
In December of 1945, Giuliano led an attack on a carabiniere post and killed a number of soldiers and police. With these attacks, Giuliano sought to strengthen the position of the Sicilian separatists. In fact, his efforts had the reverse effect. When a plebiscite was conducted in April of 1946, the separatists won only 9% of the vote – although Monreal and Montelepre, not surprisingly, voted overwhelmingly for independence from Rome, the rest of Sicily was concerned that, under Giuliano’s leadership, the island would slip into anarchy.
With the dream of Sicilian independence crushed by the 1946 election, Giuliano moved to a closer affiliation with the Mafia and the right-wing monarchists. This led to the accusation that he was involved in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra that occurred on May 1, 1947. Communists and left-wing politicians sponsored an annual May Day picnic in a mountain meadow between three liberal towns in the vicinity. Giuliano met with an American journalist a couple weeks before the massacre and expressed his undying and fierce opposition to Communism – it is possible he was trying to impress the journalist and curry favor in the United States. (He also gave the journalist a letter of greetings to President Harry Truman, announcing his loyalty to the United States in the face of Communist aggression.) On May Day, between three-thousand and five-thousand peasants had gathered to feast and hear speeches in the mountain pass under Mount Pizzuta known as Portella della Ginesetta. In the course of the celebration, machine gun fire raked the crowd from the vicinity of Mount Pizzuta. Eleven people, including four children, were killed. At least thirty people were wounded.
The attack on the unarmed peasants at the May Day celebration was a cause of outrage throughout all of Italy. Giuliano was accused of the crime and, in fact, eight of his men were convicted of participating in the massacre in the aftermath of the Viterbo trial in 1953. Giuliano’s involvement in the massacre remains highly controversial to this day – some maintain he was the engineer of the killings, others absolve him completely, and some say that he was a tool of the Mafia who planned the massacre and were ultimately responsible for it. At the site of the killings, there are monuments to the events of May 1, 1947 that ascribe blame for the killings on the Mafia and right-wing elements (Monarchists). These monuments do not mention Salvatore Giuliano at all. (Giuliano made inconsistent comments about the massacre from time to time and, probably, was involved in some way – but it is clear that he and his men were scapegoated as the architects of the outrage in the Viterbo trials.)
After the Portella della Ginestra killings, Giuliano’s exploits lost their luster. The events of the next few years are complex but led inexorably to Giuliano’s demise. Giuliano waged a sporadic, low-level war against the authorities, supporting his operations with relentless campaigns of extortion and kidnaping. Violent and repressive measures against the people of Monreal and Montelepre simply increased Giuliano’s prestige in those communities. In 1949, General Ugo Lucca was sent to Siciliy to capture Giuliano and pacify the mountains around Palermo that were Giuliano’s headquarters. Lucca was a cautious, hardheaded soldier and he understood the necessity of working with all members in the community to isolate Giuliano. Ultimately, Giuliano’s forces were defeated, his allies either killed or bribed into betraying him, and, at last, Giuliano was murdered in the mysterious circumstances depicted in Rosi’s film in July 1950.
With Giuliano out of the way, the Italian government contrived a cover-up of right-wing complicty in the 1947 May Day massacre. Highly politicized show-trials were conducted at Viterbo in 1953. During these trials, Giuliano’s men were convicted of participating in Portella della Ginestra massacre. Also during those trials, Giuliano’s right-hand man and first cousin, Gaspare Pisciotta, confessed to killing Salvatore – a confession made to discredit the government; the official account was that Giuliano had died in a fierce thirty minute firefight between the bandit and government forces at Castelvetrano.
In 1954, Pisciotta himself was poisoned when he had breakfast with his father in their prison cell. It was reported that a dose of strychnine sufficient to have killed "forty dogs" was found in his coffee.
Omerto
Omerto is a word derived from the Spanish – homeradad ("manliness"). Crossed with the Sicilian dialect term for "man" (‘omu’), Spanish "manliness" becomes an Italian code of honor. Omerto is the Mafia’s core value and Salvatore Giuliano can not be understood without an awareness of this ethic.
Omerto prohibits all cooperation with lawfully constituted legal authorities. A person who is wronged is forbidden recourse to the police or courts. Rather, the wronged person, if a man, must pursue self-help and wreak his own vengeance on the wrongdoer. Women must act through family members or patrons to redress wrongs inflicted upon them. It is regarded as cowardly and treacherous to report a crime to the police. Similarly, cooperation with lawfully constituted authorities, the representatives of the State government, is also forbidden – one may not testify as a witness or assist authorities in their investigation of crime. The penalty for non-compliance with this code is death.
Radical self-help as contemplated by the canons of omerto arises from the fact that Sicily, the most famous example of a society regulated in this way, has never been free. Sicily, located at the strategic crossroads of the Mediterranean has always been occupied by invading and enemy powers. Thus, cooperation with these occupation forces has always been deemed traitorous.
Two Sicilian proverbs explain omerto. A wounded man has fallen to the street, the victim of gaping knife wound. He says to his assailant: "If I live, I will kill you. If I die, I forgive you."
And: Cu e surdu orbu e taci, campa cent’anna ‘mpaci. ("He who is deaf, blind, and silent, lives for a hundred years in peace.")
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Frank Wolff
Only two professional actors appear in Salvatore Giuliano. One of them is the American, Frank Wolff. (The man playing the Judge in the trial scene is the Italian actor, Salvo Rondano, a famous stage actor; Rosi needed someone with a patrician appearance and accent to contrast with the rough dialect of the non-professional Sicilians.)
Frank Wolff was the son of German immigrants to Oakland, California. From an early age, he was encouraged to express himself creatively. He attended theater classes at UCLA and was close friends with Monte Hellmann, a student at that school who, later, became a well-known, if eccentric, director.
Wolff was the kind of actor who was almost too handsome. There was something unnatural about his beauty. After graduating from college, he appeared frequently in small roles in television productions before coming to the attention of the exploitation-film director, Roger Corman. Corman hired Wolff to appear in a number of his films, most notably, The Beast from the Haunted Cave, a picture directed by his classmate, Monte Hellman.
In 1960, Corman’s American International Pictures was producing a sword-and-sandals picture in Greece. Wolff played a major role in the film. After completing the shoot, Corman suggested to Wolff that he acquire a European agent and look for acting jobs in Germany and Italy. Wolff accepted Corman’s advice and began working extensively in the Italian cinema. All Italian films are post-synchronized; this means that movies made in Italy are shot without sound – for this reason, Wolff could perform in Italian films even though he didn’t speak the language. (The same production technique allowed Rod Steiger to star in Hands Across the City and Burt Lancaster to appear in both Visconti’s The Leopard and Bertolucci’s 1900.) Wolff became extremely popular in Italy and, ultimately, made dozens of pictures in that country.
At the beginning of his career, Rosi cast Wolff in Salvatore Giuliano – it is interesting to note that Wolff is given prominent credit in the film’s opening titles. Wolff never returned to the United States. He had an important role as a Greek in Elia Kazan’s America, America! (1963), a film shot in Greece, and appeared in many spaghetti westerns, most notably, The Great Silence (1968) and Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West, also released in 1968.
Wolff killed himself in a Rome hotel room in 1971 – he was 42 years old. Wolff’s last role was as Grrr in When Women Lost their Tails. (He was reprising his role as Grrr in the film made previous to this sequel, When Women Had Tails.) When Women Lost their Tails was released after Woff’s death.
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
Rosi shot Salvatore Giuliano on location using, if possible, Sicilians who had participated in the actual events depicted in the film. As a result the movie is startlingly realistic – comparison of shots in the movie with newsreel footage of historical events shows astonishing attention to detail and, in many cases, the real footage is indistinguishable from Rosi’s recreation. (The overhead angle showing Giuliani’s corpse in the courtyard in Castelventrano replicates exactly pictures published in Italian tabloids showing the scene of the outlaw’s death – the man who has wrapped a white cloth over his head against the blazing Sicilian sun is visible in both the newspaper pictures and Rosi’s restaging of the scene.)
In a scene shot in Montelepre, Rosi required the women in the town to attack the soldiers. The ladies in the village thought it improper to appear on film and declined to participate in the scene. At a loss for actresses, Rosi scoured the red light district in Palermo and shipped a couple of bus loads of prostitutes over the mountain pass to Montelepre to serve as extras in the film. This so offended the women in Montelepre that they renounced their previous reservations about appearing in the movie and enthusiastically participated – the shots of the women in Montelepre, accordingly, show a combination of local ladies and Palermo prostitutes.
The old woman who plays Giuliano’s mother had lost her son in the fighting a decade earlier. Her wailing over the dead body of Giuliano was so authentic and heartfelt that it discomfited Rosi and his crew. They shot only a couple takes of the mourning scene for fear that the old woman would collapse.
After the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, people from the three cities neighboring the mountain pass continued their May Day celebrations. In 1961, Rosi asked the May Day celebrants to remain on location on May 2nd and 3rd so he could film the massacre sequence. Most of the people shown in the movie were at the celebration in 1947 and had family members or close relatives killed or wounded in the attack. Rosi shot the scene with three cameras. When the machine gun on the mountain began firing blanks toward the crowd, chaos erupted. It was as if people were reliving the trauma of the original event. Men and women hurled themselves to the ground and old women began to wail. There was general confusion – one of the cameras was knocked down and trampled. Children were screaming and people began to weep uncontrollably. The photographer managing a hand-held camera in the midst of the crowd of terrified people said that he had never seen anything like the spontaneous riot that ensued when the sequence was shot. Lina Wertmueller, later a famous director in her own right, was present on that day and said that the reactions of the crowd were so vivid that she was afraid that actual live ammunition was being fired. Fifty years later, Rosi said that the sequence caused its participants to actually experience the massacre again.
The most unpleasant aspect of shooting the film on-location in Sicily was dealing with Mafia blackmail. A host of "nasty little lawyers" claiming to represent Giuliano’s family engaged in a guerilla war of extortion and blackmail against the film and its makers. The lawyers appearing for the outlaw’s family demanded the payment of tribute since the movie was claimed "to blacken the reputation" of a man "who was never convicted of any crime."
Interpretation
Two canonical Hollywood films begin, like Salvatore Giuliano, with sequences showing the death of their protagonists. In Citizen Kane (1941), a newsreel, scrupulously mimicking The March of Time short subjects screened before feature films, tells us that Charles Foster Kane has died and provides a brief survey of his life and times. Sunset Blvd (1950) starts with a shot of its hero floating dead in a swimming pool; a voice-over, purporting to be the words of the corpse, promises to tell us how this came to pass. In both cases, the protagonist is dead and the film’s narrative recounts factors leading to the hero’s death – in effect, proposing to solve mysteries created in the movie’s opening. Salvatore Giuliano follows this tried-and-true narrative device, but very quickly deviates from the Hollywood model.
Both Hollywood examples immediately plunge us into the plot, flashing back to a time when the hero was young and vigorous. By contrast, the hero of Rosi’s film is mysteriously absent from the entire movie. Except as a corpse, the camera never focuses on Giuliano except in extreme long-shot; there are no close-ups or, even, medium shots of the film’s ostensible protagonist, at least, while he is alive. The outlaw’s absence from the film that bears his name suggests that he is not really the subject of the movie and casts a skeptical light on the thesis that he is an agent in the historical events depicted. Rosi’‘s bold narrative stance, excluding Giuliano from the film, reflects the historical reality painstakingly uncovered by the movie – Giuliano is not a great man who guides events; rather, he is a pawn of powers that are much greater than him.
Even more radical is Rosi’s decision to not characterize those powers. Giuliano is controlled by unseen forces that have this peculiar characteristic – they are simultaneously known by everyone to the point that no one needs to articulate their existence, while, at the same time, incapable of being precisely defined. This eerie simultaneity of ubiquitous knowledge as to a force that eludes any coherent description defines Italian politics to some extent, but is, precisely, characteristic of Sicilian history and culture. Corrupt forces are everywhere, part of the ambient atmosphere – but they are too deep-rooted, pervasive and complex to be effectively defined.
Sicily’s greatest novelist, after the sublime Lampedusa, is Leonardo Sciascia. Sciascia is best known for his metaphysical crime novels and short stories. In a novel contemporary to Salvatore Giuliano, Sciascia’s To Each his Own, a small-town pharmacist becomes obsessed with solving a double homicide that has taken the life of a local doctor, one of the hero’s friends. After much sleuthing, the pharmacist announces that he has solved the crime. But, before he can identify the killer, the pharmacist is murdered himself – in a single sentence, Sciascia lets us know that his hero’s corpse is at the bottom of a sulphur mine high in the mountains. The pharmacist’s efforts are pointless for two reasons – first, he is killed before he can announce his conclusions, but, more importantly, Sciascia shows that everyone in the town knows the identity of the murderer as well as the motive for the double homicide; the only person not privy to the general gossip as to the nature of the crime and the killer is the hapless and naive pharmacist. In a famous short story, "Philology," published in the collection of tales The Wine Dark Sea, Sciascia depicts two thugs preparing for a public hearing as to the existence of the Mafia – they indulge in a mock-learned disquisition as to the source of the word "Mafia" and conclude that it may mean "loyalty," or "freedom" and may refer to either freemasons or a certain form of cavalier or outlaw now fortunately extinct or some other mythological secret society. In any event, the two criminals conclude, the word has no current meaning and does not refer to any actual organization.
Rosi has adapted Sciascia’s book, Excellent Cadavers into a film We still kill the same old way (1967) and his early films are imbued with a similar perspective and metaphysic of action. Everyone simultaneously knows and doesn’t know. In cinematic terms, this translates into a narrative in the passive tense – things happen, but they aren’t done. We don’t know who is acting. (This curious passivity may have a relationship to a linguistic oddity – Sicilian doesn’t have a future tense. In Sicilian, you can’t say: "I will kill you." Instead, you must use the "future anterior" or "future perfect’ tense: ‘By tomorrow night, I will have killed you," or more simply an imperative: "Tomorrow night, I have to kill you.") In any event, several sequences depict violent events from a point of view that makes it unclear, and, possibly, irrelevant as to the identity of the persons committing the violence. At Portera della Ginera, machine gun fire reverberates across the pass and people fall; but the gunman is too remote for us to see who is doing the shooting. In the film’s final scene, one of the men who has betrayed Giuliano and supervised the mob-style execution of his henchmen is killed: we hear gun shots, the crowd disperses, and a single corpse lies in the center of the field. Someone poisons Gaspare Pisciotta – the identity of poisoner is never revealed and probably insignificant in any event. The code of Omerta required Pisciotta’s death and the precise agent chosen to execute him is unimportant.
In form, Rosi’s film may be divided into three parts. After the initial discovery of Giuliano’s corpse that frames the film, the movie begins with a semi-documentary narrative showing Giuliano’s exploits culminating in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra. The first of the film’s three acts, this part of the movie features breathtaking mountain landscapes – the pictorial form is that of an American western, vast landscapes traversed by small, heroic figures. The movie’s second act consists of the flamboyant trial sequences, a very detailed re-enactment of the Viterbo trial intended to establish responsibility for the Portella della Ginestra massacre. Pictorially, this part of the film is designed according to offsetting schemes emphasizing one man against many – close-ups of the Judge ranged against the groups of outlaws in their cages; the camera searches people’s faces for clues to their motives, but it is never clear exactly why the men are acting as they do. (The trial portion of the film is very obscure to me – I can’t fathom exactly what is occurring; the lawyers engage in politically motivated outbursts and the defendants make strangely eloquent, if legally irrelevant, speeches. The trial is like an exercise in alien anthropology – we see a spectacle that is intended to have a powerful political significance, but can’t quite understand what is happening or why.) In my view, the trial shows that it is functionally impossible to establish "responsibility" for events given the complexity of the political and sociological milieu in which those events occur.
In the course of the trial scenes, a crucial flashback provides a glimmer of explanation: in Palermo, two men meet in a squalid wine-vendor’s shop. One of these men seems to be a Mafia chieftain. The other man is a liaison to General Lucca, the soldier attempting to capture Giuliano. So far as this scene can be understood, and it is also rife with unspoken subtexts, the Mafia chieftain expresses the view that the government’s crackdown on underground elements in northern Sicily has severely hampered the Mafia’s operations and profits. Accordingly, the Mafia chieftain agrees to cooperate with the military to arrange for the capture or murder of Giuliano’s close associates and, ultimately, the brigand himself. After this pivotal sequence, the film enters its third act – essentially, a coda to the main action: this part of the film shows Giuliano’s inevitable betrayal and, then, retribution enacted against those who betrayed him. According to the Mafia code, betrayal must be punished with death. Accordingly, after Giuliano has been murdered, those who killed him must also be eliminated for two reasons: first, the killers are killed to silence them; and, second, Omerta requires that traitors die.
Martin Scorsese praising Salvatore Giuliano hails the pictures "hard objectivity" and something that is "incredibly rare" –"the film’s combination of the lyrical and the political." In European film criticism, Salvatore Giuliano is a touchstone picture, a film that measures the accomplishment of other movies. European critics reviewing, for instance, Oliver Stone’s paranoid thriller JFK, noted scornfully that the America film was "simple-minded" and "certainly no Salvatore Giuliano." And, indeed, Salvatore Giuliano establishes the model for a kind of "paranoid style" later to animate much literature and film in the post-Watergate era: there is a conspiracy to do harm in the world, but we can’t say exactly who is involved or why.
As investigative journalism, Salvatore Giuliano has a different status than most other films. The purpose of the movie is to unmask corruption previously concealed and tell a story that had been falsified by public officials and media. Salvatore Giuliano is not just a film, accordingly, but, also, a historical event in its own right, the revelation to Italian audiences of Sicilian corruption not known to most people living in the metropolitan centers of the "north" – that is, Rome and other places closer to the European mainland.
Salvatore Giuliano is one of Martin Scorsese’s "twelve best films of all time." Francis Ford Coppola, who shot parts of Godfather II and III, in Sicily hails Salvatore Giuliano as "the greatest Mafia movie ever made." Until the picture’s release on DVD by Criterion, the movie was completely unknown in the United States. It was never theatrically released in this country. The film is so intensely specific to Italian, and, particularly, Sicilian history and politics that it was widely, and, probably, correctly understood, to have no interest to most American audiences. By contrast, Rosi’s films, including Salvatore Giuliano, are well-known in Europe and the director is regarded as one of the most important of all Italian film makers.
Francesco Rosi
Francesco Rosi was born in 1922 in Naples. He was raised in a comfortable middle-class environment. In the late forties, Rosi lived in Rome where he worked as an illustrator of children’s books. (Like Fellini, Rosi began his career as a cartoonist; Rosi’s father also dabbled in satirical cartoons and, in fact, was almost jailed by Mussolini for an insulting caricature.) Rosi assisted Luchino Visconti in his film La Terra Trema, an important neo-realist picture made in Sicily. It was on location for that film that Rosi decided that he wanted to make movies.
In the fifties, Rosi worked as an assistant director on a number of movies. He also directed two mafia-themed crime pictures. Salvatore Giuliano was his third picture, won the Silver Bear award at Berlin, and brought Rosi to the attention of the European cinema community. A box-office and critical success in Italy, Salvatore Giuliano opened the door to Rosi making bigger budget (and more conventional) films with "bankable" movie stars. He followed Salvatore Giuliano with an equally uncompromising film investigating corruption in the building industry in post-war Palermo, Hands Across the City. The film starred Rod Steiger in the hope that the picture would find an international audience – in fact, the movie played in the United States only for a couple of showings in Little Italy in New York City.
Rosi made many other films, almost all of them unknown in this country and unavailable on DVD or otherwise. There’s no point listing movies that you can’t see. I will content myself with observing that Rosi won the Palm d’Or at Cannes with The Mattei Affair (1972) another movie about political corruption. His last picture, The Truce, adapts a memoir by Primo Levi and starred John Turturro – it was made in 1997.
Rosi died in 2015 at the age of 92. At the Berlin Film Festival, his horrific anti-war film, Many Wars Ago (1970) was screened. In his later films, Rosi gravitated toward literature and adapted several well-known books to the screen, chief among them Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1987), and a film version of Leonardo Sciascia’s crime novel, Illustrious Cadavers (1976).
I have seen Rosi’s film version of Carlo Levi’s memoir Christ stopped at Eboli as well as his film about bullfighting, The Moment of Truth (1965), the director’s first color film. I have also watched Hands Across the City. Christ stopped at Eboli is beautifully made and adapted, but seems to require knowledge of Italian politics and folkways that I don’t have. Hands Across the City is a muckraking study of corruption – after an extraordinary beginning involving the collapse of a poorly built and subcode apartment building, the film loses me in its incredibly detailed chronicle of corruption and bid-rigging trials in Palermo. The Moment of Truth is probably an excellent film, but its subject matter is repugnant to me and the movie is, almost, unbearably brutal and gory – animals were definitely harmed in the production of this bullfighting film. Based on these movies, it is apparent to me that Rosi was a film maker with exceptional gifts. At Berlin, it was said that he made his camera an instrument for the "moral dissection of the truth." One commentator says that Rosi’s "engaged cinema" embodies the Italian Marxist, Gramsci’s slogan: "Pessimism of the intelligence, optimism of the Will."
No doubt exists that Rosi’s films have been very influential in Italy. Paolo Sorrentino’s picture about the "Black Pope," Giulio Andreotti, Il Divo, (2008) is unthinkable without the examples of Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Across the City. Similarly, Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous neo-realist film about the Algerian insurgency, The Battle of Algiers (1967) is shot and edited like Salvatore Giuliano.
The real Salvatore Giuliano
The motives and character of the Sicilian bandit, Salvatore Giuliano, remain controversial to this day. The Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawn, opined that Giuliano was the last of the "people’s bandits" – that is, a figure like Robin Hood who redressed wrongs in semi-feudal Sicily. Others argue that Giuliano was a vicious thug and murderer, the engineer of an infamous massacre in which four children were shot dead. Some writers believe that Giuliano was a hapless victim of political circumstances much too vast and complex for him to understand. Michael Stern, a journalist who met the theatrical Giuliano in 1947, said that he seemed to be "Errol Flynn playing Pancho Villa."
Giuliano was born in 1922 in Montelepre, a village about twenty miles to the west of Palermo in the Sicilian mountains. He was a good student, but left high school when he was 13 to begin trafficking in olive oil. His father was drafted into service with the Italian armies fighting alongside Germany. Sicily, always poor, became more impoverished during World War II. Furthermore, chaos erupted in Sicily in July 1943 when the Allies invaded the island. Prior to the invasion, the Allies had urged Sicilians, who had only a loose affiliation with the rest of Italy, to revolt against both Berlin and Rome. Indeed, some elements of Sicilian society were in perpetual insurgency against Rome – these were people associated with the Mafia in alliance with the feudal landed aristocracy. (In Sicily, the Mafia is traditionally associated with right-wing politics, the peasantry, and Catholicism.) Accordingly, the Allies encouraged the Mafia, and other right-wing elements, to assist their invading forces.
With war raging in Sicily, the economy collapsed. Food was scarce and trading on the black market at extortionate prices. The United States military command deputized local Mafia chieftains to restore order by enacting rough justice on shopkeepers and other merchants who charged their customers black market prices. Salvatore Giuliano was caught in this turbulence. On September 2, 1943, Giuliano was stopped at a road block. He was apparently smuggling grain, possibly for sale on the black market. Although the circumstances are disputed, the 21-year old Giuliano was involved in an altercations with one of the carabiniere at the road block and killed the man. (Some sources say that he shot the carabiniere in the back). Giuliano, then, did what Sicilian outlaws have done since ancient times – he retreated into the mountains to hide-out.
A drag-net was instituted to hunt Giuliano. People were rounded-up and interrogated and members of Giuliano’s family were arrested. As the United States was to learn in Iraq and Afghanistan, these measures simply increase local hostility to the occupying police forces. In Sicily, hostility was further exacerbated by the fact that the occupation employed local Fascist police, carabiniere, and politicians to enforce its laws. Many of these people were already despised by the peasantry and the Mafia and, so, the situation was rife for civil conflict. On January 30, 1944, Giuliano with some compatriots staged a daring jail break at Monreal, a mountain suburb of Palermo. Giuliano’s men freed eight prisoners who became the nucleus of the bandit’s gang.
Many of Giuliano’s exploits prior to the Portella della Gineste massacre were famous in Sicily and, in fact, throughout Italy. Giuliano enforced fair prices for food in the Montelepre area, beating and, even, killing storeowners who overcharged their customers. He used extortion to compel redistribution of land in some districts where his forces were powerful. His most famous exploit was a burglary committed on the estate of a local Duchess, the Duchess of Pratemeno. Giuliano, with his henchmen, entered the woman’s estate, confronted her, and, after chivalrously kissing her hand, demanded that the woman surrender all of her jewelry. When she refused, Giuliano threatened to kidnap her children and she relented. The bandit took a diamond ring from the woman’s hand, the ring that he was wearing when killed in 1950. He also borrowed from her a copy of John Steinbeck’s novel, In Dubious Battle. After reading the book, he returned it to her with a polite note of thanks. These kinds of picturesque details lent a patina of glamor to Giuliano’s crimes – mostly garden-variety kidnapings for ransom and extortion. As a kidnapper, Giuliano was exquisitely courteous, treated his victims to their favorite meals, and took pride in not inflicting any injury on anyone. Giuliano’s fame was enhanced by his American connections – he was said to be friends with Italian-American gangsters – and his movie-star good looks.
In April 1945, Giuliano announced his support for the Sicilian separatism, a political movement accidentally unleashed by American support for the Mafia and right-wing monarchists as allies against the Germans (and Rome) during the war. Giuliano cloaked some of his depredations in the flag of Sicilian independence and was, in fact, granted a military commission in the putative new nation’s army. At this time, Giuliano commanded a group of insurgents estimated at about 60 men. His lieutenant was Gaspara Pisciotta, Giuliano’s first cousin, and a war hero. Pisciotta had been captured by the Germans while fighting against them and, after release from prison, joined Giuliano in his support of Sicilian independence. Pisciotta is a key figure in the story of Giuliano and, in fact, later confessed to killing his cousin in the Viterbo trial over the Portella della Ginestra massacre. Pisciotta was also very handsome and there are many pictures showing the two beautiful men together.
In December of 1945, Giuliano led an attack on a carabiniere post and killed a number of soldiers and police. With these attacks, Giuliano sought to strengthen the position of the Sicilian separatists. In fact, his efforts had the reverse effect. When a plebiscite was conducted in April of 1946, the separatists won only 9% of the vote – although Monreal and Montelepre, not surprisingly, voted overwhelmingly for independence from Rome, the rest of Sicily was concerned that, under Giuliano’s leadership, the island would slip into anarchy.
With the dream of Sicilian independence crushed by the 1946 election, Giuliano moved to a closer affiliation with the Mafia and the right-wing monarchists. This led to the accusation that he was involved in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra that occurred on May 1, 1947. Communists and left-wing politicians sponsored an annual May Day picnic in a mountain meadow between three liberal towns in the vicinity. Giuliano met with an American journalist a couple weeks before the massacre and expressed his undying and fierce opposition to Communism – it is possible he was trying to impress the journalist and curry favor in the United States. (He also gave the journalist a letter of greetings to President Harry Truman, announcing his loyalty to the United States in the face of Communist aggression.) On May Day, between three-thousand and five-thousand peasants had gathered to feast and hear speeches in the mountain pass under Mount Pizzuta known as Portella della Ginesetta. In the course of the celebration, machine gun fire raked the crowd from the vicinity of Mount Pizzuta. Eleven people, including four children, were killed. At least thirty people were wounded.
The attack on the unarmed peasants at the May Day celebration was a cause of outrage throughout all of Italy. Giuliano was accused of the crime and, in fact, eight of his men were convicted of participating in the massacre in the aftermath of the Viterbo trial in 1953. Giuliano’s involvement in the massacre remains highly controversial to this day – some maintain he was the engineer of the killings, others absolve him completely, and some say that he was a tool of the Mafia who planned the massacre and were ultimately responsible for it. At the site of the killings, there are monuments to the events of May 1, 1947 that ascribe blame for the killings on the Mafia and right-wing elements (Monarchists). These monuments do not mention Salvatore Giuliano at all. (Giuliano made inconsistent comments about the massacre from time to time and, probably, was involved in some way – but it is clear that he and his men were scapegoated as the architects of the outrage in the Viterbo trials.)
After the Portella della Ginestra killings, Giuliano’s exploits lost their luster. The events of the next few years are complex but led inexorably to Giuliano’s demise. Giuliano waged a sporadic, low-level war against the authorities, supporting his operations with relentless campaigns of extortion and kidnaping. Violent and repressive measures against the people of Monreal and Montelepre simply increased Giuliano’s prestige in those communities. In 1949, General Ugo Lucca was sent to Siciliy to capture Giuliano and pacify the mountains around Palermo that were Giuliano’s headquarters. Lucca was a cautious, hardheaded soldier and he understood the necessity of working with all members in the community to isolate Giuliano. Ultimately, Giuliano’s forces were defeated, his allies either killed or bribed into betraying him, and, at last, Giuliano was murdered in the mysterious circumstances depicted in Rosi’s film in July 1950.
With Giuliano out of the way, the Italian government contrived a cover-up of right-wing complicty in the 1947 May Day massacre. Highly politicized show-trials were conducted at Viterbo in 1953. During these trials, Giuliano’s men were convicted of participating in Portella della Ginestra massacre. Also during those trials, Giuliano’s right-hand man and first cousin, Gaspare Pisciotta, confessed to killing Salvatore – a confession made to discredit the government; the official account was that Giuliano had died in a fierce thirty minute firefight between the bandit and government forces at Castelvetrano.
In 1954, Pisciotta himself was poisoned when he had breakfast with his father in their prison cell. It was reported that a dose of strychnine sufficient to have killed "forty dogs" was found in his coffee.
Omerto
Omerto is a word derived from the Spanish – homeradad ("manliness"). Crossed with the Sicilian dialect term for "man" (‘omu’), Spanish "manliness" becomes an Italian code of honor. Omerto is the Mafia’s core value and Salvatore Giuliano can not be understood without an awareness of this ethic.
Omerto prohibits all cooperation with lawfully constituted legal authorities. A person who is wronged is forbidden recourse to the police or courts. Rather, the wronged person, if a man, must pursue self-help and wreak his own vengeance on the wrongdoer. Women must act through family members or patrons to redress wrongs inflicted upon them. It is regarded as cowardly and treacherous to report a crime to the police. Similarly, cooperation with lawfully constituted authorities, the representatives of the State government, is also forbidden – one may not testify as a witness or assist authorities in their investigation of crime. The penalty for non-compliance with this code is death.
Radical self-help as contemplated by the canons of omerto arises from the fact that Sicily, the most famous example of a society regulated in this way, has never been free. Sicily, located at the strategic crossroads of the Mediterranean has always been occupied by invading and enemy powers. Thus, cooperation with these occupation forces has always been deemed traitorous.
Two Sicilian proverbs explain omerto. A wounded man has fallen to the street, the victim of gaping knife wound. He says to his assailant: "If I live, I will kill you. If I die, I forgive you."
And: Cu e surdu orbu e taci, campa cent’anna ‘mpaci. ("He who is deaf, blind, and silent, lives for a hundred years in peace.")
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Frank Wolff
Only two professional actors appear in Salvatore Giuliano. One of them is the American, Frank Wolff. (The man playing the Judge in the trial scene is the Italian actor, Salvo Rondano, a famous stage actor; Rosi needed someone with a patrician appearance and accent to contrast with the rough dialect of the non-professional Sicilians.)
Frank Wolff was the son of German immigrants to Oakland, California. From an early age, he was encouraged to express himself creatively. He attended theater classes at UCLA and was close friends with Monte Hellmann, a student at that school who, later, became a well-known, if eccentric, director.
Wolff was the kind of actor who was almost too handsome. There was something unnatural about his beauty. After graduating from college, he appeared frequently in small roles in television productions before coming to the attention of the exploitation-film director, Roger Corman. Corman hired Wolff to appear in a number of his films, most notably, The Beast from the Haunted Cave, a picture directed by his classmate, Monte Hellman.
In 1960, Corman’s American International Pictures was producing a sword-and-sandals picture in Greece. Wolff played a major role in the film. After completing the shoot, Corman suggested to Wolff that he acquire a European agent and look for acting jobs in Germany and Italy. Wolff accepted Corman’s advice and began working extensively in the Italian cinema. All Italian films are post-synchronized; this means that movies made in Italy are shot without sound – for this reason, Wolff could perform in Italian films even though he didn’t speak the language. (The same production technique allowed Rod Steiger to star in Hands Across the City and Burt Lancaster to appear in both Visconti’s The Leopard and Bertolucci’s 1900.) Wolff became extremely popular in Italy and, ultimately, made dozens of pictures in that country.
At the beginning of his career, Rosi cast Wolff in Salvatore Giuliano – it is interesting to note that Wolff is given prominent credit in the film’s opening titles. Wolff never returned to the United States. He had an important role as a Greek in Elia Kazan’s America, America! (1963), a film shot in Greece, and appeared in many spaghetti westerns, most notably, The Great Silence (1968) and Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West, also released in 1968.
Wolff killed himself in a Rome hotel room in 1971 – he was 42 years old. Wolff’s last role was as Grrr in When Women Lost their Tails. (He was reprising his role as Grrr in the film made previous to this sequel, When Women Had Tails.) When Women Lost their Tails was released after Woff’s death.
Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
Rosi shot Salvatore Giuliano on location using, if possible, Sicilians who had participated in the actual events depicted in the film. As a result the movie is startlingly realistic – comparison of shots in the movie with newsreel footage of historical events shows astonishing attention to detail and, in many cases, the real footage is indistinguishable from Rosi’s recreation. (The overhead angle showing Giuliani’s corpse in the courtyard in Castelventrano replicates exactly pictures published in Italian tabloids showing the scene of the outlaw’s death – the man who has wrapped a white cloth over his head against the blazing Sicilian sun is visible in both the newspaper pictures and Rosi’s restaging of the scene.)
In a scene shot in Montelepre, Rosi required the women in the town to attack the soldiers. The ladies in the village thought it improper to appear on film and declined to participate in the scene. At a loss for actresses, Rosi scoured the red light district in Palermo and shipped a couple of bus loads of prostitutes over the mountain pass to Montelepre to serve as extras in the film. This so offended the women in Montelepre that they renounced their previous reservations about appearing in the movie and enthusiastically participated – the shots of the women in Montelepre, accordingly, show a combination of local ladies and Palermo prostitutes.
The old woman who plays Giuliano’s mother had lost her son in the fighting a decade earlier. Her wailing over the dead body of Giuliano was so authentic and heartfelt that it discomfited Rosi and his crew. They shot only a couple takes of the mourning scene for fear that the old woman would collapse.
After the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, people from the three cities neighboring the mountain pass continued their May Day celebrations. In 1961, Rosi asked the May Day celebrants to remain on location on May 2nd and 3rd so he could film the massacre sequence. Most of the people shown in the movie were at the celebration in 1947 and had family members or close relatives killed or wounded in the attack. Rosi shot the scene with three cameras. When the machine gun on the mountain began firing blanks toward the crowd, chaos erupted. It was as if people were reliving the trauma of the original event. Men and women hurled themselves to the ground and old women began to wail. There was general confusion – one of the cameras was knocked down and trampled. Children were screaming and people began to weep uncontrollably. The photographer managing a hand-held camera in the midst of the crowd of terrified people said that he had never seen anything like the spontaneous riot that ensued when the sequence was shot. Lina Wertmueller, later a famous director in her own right, was present on that day and said that the reactions of the crowd were so vivid that she was afraid that actual live ammunition was being fired. Fifty years later, Rosi said that the sequence caused its participants to actually experience the massacre again.
The most unpleasant aspect of shooting the film on-location in Sicily was dealing with Mafia blackmail. A host of "nasty little lawyers" claiming to represent Giuliano’s family engaged in a guerilla war of extortion and blackmail against the film and its makers. The lawyers appearing for the outlaw’s family demanded the payment of tribute since the movie was claimed "to blacken the reputation" of a man "who was never convicted of any crime."
Interpretation
Two canonical Hollywood films begin, like Salvatore Giuliano, with sequences showing the death of their protagonists. In Citizen Kane (1941), a newsreel, scrupulously mimicking The March of Time short subjects screened before feature films, tells us that Charles Foster Kane has died and provides a brief survey of his life and times. Sunset Blvd (1950) starts with a shot of its hero floating dead in a swimming pool; a voice-over, purporting to be the words of the corpse, promises to tell us how this came to pass. In both cases, the protagonist is dead and the film’s narrative recounts factors leading to the hero’s death – in effect, proposing to solve mysteries created in the movie’s opening. Salvatore Giuliano follows this tried-and-true narrative device, but very quickly deviates from the Hollywood model.
Both Hollywood examples immediately plunge us into the plot, flashing back to a time when the hero was young and vigorous. By contrast, the hero of Rosi’s film is mysteriously absent from the entire movie. Except as a corpse, the camera never focuses on Giuliano except in extreme long-shot; there are no close-ups or, even, medium shots of the film’s ostensible protagonist, at least, while he is alive. The outlaw’s absence from the film that bears his name suggests that he is not really the subject of the movie and casts a skeptical light on the thesis that he is an agent in the historical events depicted. Rosi’‘s bold narrative stance, excluding Giuliano from the film, reflects the historical reality painstakingly uncovered by the movie – Giuliano is not a great man who guides events; rather, he is a pawn of powers that are much greater than him.
Even more radical is Rosi’s decision to not characterize those powers. Giuliano is controlled by unseen forces that have this peculiar characteristic – they are simultaneously known by everyone to the point that no one needs to articulate their existence, while, at the same time, incapable of being precisely defined. This eerie simultaneity of ubiquitous knowledge as to a force that eludes any coherent description defines Italian politics to some extent, but is, precisely, characteristic of Sicilian history and culture. Corrupt forces are everywhere, part of the ambient atmosphere – but they are too deep-rooted, pervasive and complex to be effectively defined.
Sicily’s greatest novelist, after the sublime Lampedusa, is Leonardo Sciascia. Sciascia is best known for his metaphysical crime novels and short stories. In a novel contemporary to Salvatore Giuliano, Sciascia’s To Each his Own, a small-town pharmacist becomes obsessed with solving a double homicide that has taken the life of a local doctor, one of the hero’s friends. After much sleuthing, the pharmacist announces that he has solved the crime. But, before he can identify the killer, the pharmacist is murdered himself – in a single sentence, Sciascia lets us know that his hero’s corpse is at the bottom of a sulphur mine high in the mountains. The pharmacist’s efforts are pointless for two reasons – first, he is killed before he can announce his conclusions, but, more importantly, Sciascia shows that everyone in the town knows the identity of the murderer as well as the motive for the double homicide; the only person not privy to the general gossip as to the nature of the crime and the killer is the hapless and naive pharmacist. In a famous short story, "Philology," published in the collection of tales The Wine Dark Sea, Sciascia depicts two thugs preparing for a public hearing as to the existence of the Mafia – they indulge in a mock-learned disquisition as to the source of the word "Mafia" and conclude that it may mean "loyalty," or "freedom" and may refer to either freemasons or a certain form of cavalier or outlaw now fortunately extinct or some other mythological secret society. In any event, the two criminals conclude, the word has no current meaning and does not refer to any actual organization.
Rosi has adapted Sciascia’s book, Excellent Cadavers into a film We still kill the same old way (1967) and his early films are imbued with a similar perspective and metaphysic of action. Everyone simultaneously knows and doesn’t know. In cinematic terms, this translates into a narrative in the passive tense – things happen, but they aren’t done. We don’t know who is acting. (This curious passivity may have a relationship to a linguistic oddity – Sicilian doesn’t have a future tense. In Sicilian, you can’t say: "I will kill you." Instead, you must use the "future anterior" or "future perfect’ tense: ‘By tomorrow night, I will have killed you," or more simply an imperative: "Tomorrow night, I have to kill you.") In any event, several sequences depict violent events from a point of view that makes it unclear, and, possibly, irrelevant as to the identity of the persons committing the violence. At Portera della Ginera, machine gun fire reverberates across the pass and people fall; but the gunman is too remote for us to see who is doing the shooting. In the film’s final scene, one of the men who has betrayed Giuliano and supervised the mob-style execution of his henchmen is killed: we hear gun shots, the crowd disperses, and a single corpse lies in the center of the field. Someone poisons Gaspare Pisciotta – the identity of poisoner is never revealed and probably insignificant in any event. The code of Omerta required Pisciotta’s death and the precise agent chosen to execute him is unimportant.
In form, Rosi’s film may be divided into three parts. After the initial discovery of Giuliano’s corpse that frames the film, the movie begins with a semi-documentary narrative showing Giuliano’s exploits culminating in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra. The first of the film’s three acts, this part of the movie features breathtaking mountain landscapes – the pictorial form is that of an American western, vast landscapes traversed by small, heroic figures. The movie’s second act consists of the flamboyant trial sequences, a very detailed re-enactment of the Viterbo trial intended to establish responsibility for the Portella della Ginestra massacre. Pictorially, this part of the film is designed according to offsetting schemes emphasizing one man against many – close-ups of the Judge ranged against the groups of outlaws in their cages; the camera searches people’s faces for clues to their motives, but it is never clear exactly why the men are acting as they do. (The trial portion of the film is very obscure to me – I can’t fathom exactly what is occurring; the lawyers engage in politically motivated outbursts and the defendants make strangely eloquent, if legally irrelevant, speeches. The trial is like an exercise in alien anthropology – we see a spectacle that is intended to have a powerful political significance, but can’t quite understand what is happening or why.) In my view, the trial shows that it is functionally impossible to establish "responsibility" for events given the complexity of the political and sociological milieu in which those events occur.
In the course of the trial scenes, a crucial flashback provides a glimmer of explanation: in Palermo, two men meet in a squalid wine-vendor’s shop. One of these men seems to be a Mafia chieftain. The other man is a liaison to General Lucca, the soldier attempting to capture Giuliano. So far as this scene can be understood, and it is also rife with unspoken subtexts, the Mafia chieftain expresses the view that the government’s crackdown on underground elements in northern Sicily has severely hampered the Mafia’s operations and profits. Accordingly, the Mafia chieftain agrees to cooperate with the military to arrange for the capture or murder of Giuliano’s close associates and, ultimately, the brigand himself. After this pivotal sequence, the film enters its third act – essentially, a coda to the main action: this part of the film shows Giuliano’s inevitable betrayal and, then, retribution enacted against those who betrayed him. According to the Mafia code, betrayal must be punished with death. Accordingly, after Giuliano has been murdered, those who killed him must also be eliminated for two reasons: first, the killers are killed to silence them; and, second, Omerta requires that traitors die.
Martin Scorsese praising Salvatore Giuliano hails the pictures "hard objectivity" and something that is "incredibly rare" –"the film’s combination of the lyrical and the political." In European film criticism, Salvatore Giuliano is a touchstone picture, a film that measures the accomplishment of other movies. European critics reviewing, for instance, Oliver Stone’s paranoid thriller JFK, noted scornfully that the America film was "simple-minded" and "certainly no Salvatore Giuliano." And, indeed, Salvatore Giuliano establishes the model for a kind of "paranoid style" later to animate much literature and film in the post-Watergate era: there is a conspiracy to do harm in the world, but we can’t say exactly who is involved or why.
Monday, June 29, 2015
Crazed Fruit -- film group essay
In Old Eden Prairie
Very few people recall Eden Prairie’s beauty 45 years ago. Today, you might survey the suburb from a hill squashed and standardized by earthmovers and see a shallow valley brimful of houses, nice-looking homes to be sure, but, more or less, alike, variations, it seems, on two or three standard models, still no trees lining the streets any taller than the redwood fences enclosing the backyards. From that perspective, you would not know that the valley was once much deeper, a crater lined with breast-high grass with a little pond opening in its navel like an eye, tall cattails shadowing the water and red-winged blackbirds darting from perch to perch and, a little way up the slope, two brown ponies with shaggy manes playing on the hillside. In those days, the landscape was intricate with creeks and tiny waterfalls, strange gloomy marshes full of contorted trees and sumac-covered embankments. Tall hills rose to ridges covered with ancient trees and deep, icy lakes filled the potholes gouged by glaciers. Near the Minnesota river, the bluffs were dissected into ravines and an artesian well gushed water from the base of steep brushy hill and, above the coulees, the land was lush, curved, pillowy like a woman’s body.
At the center of this landscape, a deep and long lake, something like a fjord extended between sheer hillsides. At one end of lake, the water lost its way in a vast, labyrinth of marsh. On the freeway side of the lake the shore was shaped like the knuckles of fist, a bumpy series of outcroppings where mansions had been built. The other side of the lake was much less domesticated, a steep vertical landscape where dairy farms crowned the heights and the terrain too steep for pasture was staked for raspberries – it wasn’t clear if there were roads on the other side of the lake and, if so, how they were accessed. In those days, forty-five years ago, this body of water, Bryant Lake, had a forlorn abandoned aspect – a person rambling over the hills might find the ruins of a silo, an overgrown beach, a rich man’s compound built before the second world war shrouded in ivy and overgrown with thorns.
When I was in college, a friend of a friend invited me from time to time to parties held in those mansions overlooking the lake, the big houses built on the bare knuckle-shaped hills between the freeway and the finger of the lake. Wealthy contractors lived in those house, the men who had built the endless additions along Winnetka Road in New Hope or in Brooklyn Center. The contractors had college-aged children, although these kids didn’t attend the university and dropped out of High School in the 11th grade to drive graders and cement trucks in their fathers’ businesses, best to learn the trade on-the-job. The kids lived in the lower floors of the split-level mansions and had their own separate entries to the houses, their own garages annexed to the side of the buildings where they kept their sports cars and motorcycles. When you attended a party at the contractor’s mansion, you entered the house through a back door and stayed below grade in a series of rooms roaring with rock and roll music and hazy with marijuana smoke. There were white freezers full of deer meat and salmon yanked from lakes in northern Manitoba, the heads of stags and bears looking down bleary-eyed on the revelry, not one but a half-dozen pool tables, shaggy carpets and gloomy bars, people sprawled unconscious in big, overstuffed chairs and couches, Tvs ignored in guest bedrooms that were always occupied by boys and drunken girls, refrigerators packed with cans of beer, a party underway that seemed to have neither beginning nor ending. The parents were never around –the contractor had taken his second or third wife to Belize or Cancun – and so the upstairs of the house, a place we never ventured into, was silent and still. If you made it to dawn, you might stagger out of the house down the hill toward the lake and a rustic marina with bedraggled sailboats and a shed full of broken Evinrude motors. A kid would be lying on the dewy grass smoking a cigarette and watching the sun claw its way up over the hills on the other side of the lake where the tumble-down dairy farms occupied the ridges. Then, you might go for a brief swim in the lake’s chilly green water or you might canoe out to the middle and sleep there until the sun was overhead and you felt sober enough to drive. The kind of life lived in those mansions was very different from the way that the people in my neighborhood, only two miles away, lived. It was a casual life, indifferent to responsibility, a party with no consequences that lasted for days.
Post-war Japan
The life-style of the rich boys and girls shown in Crazed Fruit was not typical for Japan in 1956, the year the film was shot and released. The kids in the movie are the children of builders and developers who made fortunes reconstructing Japan during the Allied Occupation. Like the confused and alienated youth in American pictures of the same era, youth culture is a car-culture. And, yet, in 1956 Japan, there was one car for every 145 people. Most Tokyo kids didn’t water ski at Hayama as shown in the film. In fact, the film hints at the austerity of the economy for most people – the heroine, who is "married" to an American husband, is presumably a middle-class girl who has had to sell herself in order to survive. Crazed Fruit was an enormous box-office success and initiated a cycle of films about the "Sun Tribe" – that is, pleasure-seeking, indolent juvenile delinquents. But for the majority of Japanese the experience of watching the film was voyeuristic: it displayed pleasures far beyond the reach of most people.
Crazed Fruit is part of a world-wide genre of films about juvenile delinquents. Notable examples contemporary to Crazed Fruit are The Blackboard Jungle and, of course, Nick Ray’s Rebel without a Cause. English movies showed disaffected "Teddy Boys" and German films developed a genre of Halbstarker films about "beatniks" in Hamburg or Munich – the seminal film in the German genre, Halbstarke was also released in 1956. (The early films by Fassbinder made a dozen years later invoke these youth movies.) Parents and teachers worried that films of this kind, far from exposing delinquency, in fact, encouraged it. And, certainly, the appeal of the free and casual life depicted in Crazed Fruit must have been substantial for Japanese young people. To avoid collateral damage, Crazed Fruit received the equivalent of an X-rating – the people the movie is about couldn’t lawfully attend it. And a few months after the film was released, the Japanese legislature considered bills aimed at censoring and outlawing Taiyozoku (Sun Tribe) films. No laws were passed and they were unnecessary anyway – Japanese society is famously self-regulating and, after 1956, the movie industry voluntarily censored itself; no new Sun Tribe films were made.
The Sun Tribe
In 1954 and 1955, Japan was electrified by two novels written by Shintaro Ishihara. These books were Crazed Fruit and Season in the Sun – both novels about "Sun Tribe" delinquents. Nikkatsu Studios bought the rights to the novels and hastened to produce low-budget, quickly shot films based on them. Crazed Fruit was the first feature film directed by Ko Nakahira, a young man who was then 30 years old. Nakahira shot the movie in just 17 days. The film has a highly polished and evocative soundtrack written by Takemitsu Tori, Japan’s greatest post-war composer, elegiac Mancini-style jazz trumpet and open-key slack-tuned Hawaiian guitars. (The music for Crazed Fruit was Tori’s first film soundtrack.) One of the film’s stars, Yujiro Ishihara, the brother of the novelist who wrote Crazed Fruit, became famous as a result of the movie and was hailed as Japan’s answer to James Dean – Yujiro Ishishara plays the part of the sexually experienced and predatory older brother.
Crazed Fruit doesn’t just document trends in youth culture – it was a seismic occurrence that created trends. Before this film was produced, most Japanese did not sun-bathe and, indeed, a pale complexion was regarded as much more beautiful than tanned skin. Japanese kids didn’t water ski. After the film’s release and success, these things changed. Crazed Fruit is said to herald deep changes in Japanese society – it altered the way that kids acted and dressed and talked. The great Japanese director, Nagisa Oshima, said that "Crazed Fruit is the first modern Japanese film" and it was much imitated and immensely influential.
One man who saw the film accidentally was Francois Truffaut. (Truffaut was trying to see something else, but was confused by the titles.) Truffaut said that the film "opened his eyes". And, an argument can be made, that one of the sources of the French "New Wave" was Nakahira’s film. (The movie was purchased for release as an exploitation film in the United States and even subtitled – a single subtitled print of the film exists re-named something like Juvenile Jungle. But the picture doesn’t seem to have ever been commercially shown in this country.)
Adults
Of course, the tragedy of youth is that beautiful boys and girls grow up and age.
The director Ko Nakahira made a number of films but never reproduced his success with his inaugural effort, Crazed Fruit. He became an alcoholic and could no longer work in the Japanese film industry. He was hired to work for the Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong. He re-made Crazed Fruit under a pseudonym in Hong Kong and died of cirrhosis when he was 52. People who have seen the re-make say that it is no good.
The novelist who wrote Crazed Fruit, Shintaro Ishihara, became a right-wing politician. In the mid-fifties, with his brother, Ishihara was briefly the center of great adulation, key figures in a youth cult. But by 1973, Ishihara had moved far to the right, was an admirer of Yukio Mishima, and signed an anti-communist pact with other right-wing politicians in his own blood. In 1975, Ishihara ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Tokyo. He was a assembly man in the city and, later, a representative to the lower house of the national legislature. Between 1999 and 2012, Ishihara was the mayor of Tokyo. He is notorious for an anti-American book called The Japan that can say "No" (1989) written with the chairman of Sony, Akio Morita – in this book, Ishihara says that the Americans are racists and dropped the atomic bomb on Japan on the basis of the racial hatred of the Japanese. In 1990, Ishihara said that the so-called "Rape of Nanking" was a fiction invented by the Chinese communists. Around this time, he justified Japan’s occupation of Korea as historically necessary. When he was attacked by Korean immigrants to Japan, Ishihara urged that these immigrants be expelled from Japan. He told Playboy that women who have lost their reproductive capacity are "drains on society" and that they "should kill themselves." When challenged on this statement, Ishihara said that the attacks on him were motivated by "tyrannical old women." He publicly argued that the Olympic games should restrict Judo to Asian participants, since Westerners practicing Judo "look like wild beasts fighting." When he backed the destruction of a forest on a famous holy mountain, Ishihara told the press that the "forest was demon-haunted, diabolical" and that "it ate human beings." He has been called the "Le Pen" of Japan. Ishihara dabbled in film directing in the early sixties, giving the trade up to ride his motorcycle across South America. He said that if he had kept making films "(he) would have been greatest filmmaker to ever work in Japan, much greater that Kurosawa."
Yujiro Ishihara, with his brother, was adulated by Japanese youth and, sometimes, called the "Japanese Elvis" – in fact, his singing style was influenced more by Bing Crosby. He married Mie Kitahara, his co-star in Crazed Fruit, in 1960. Ishihara lived fast, chain-smoked, and ate only red meat – he developed a series of cancers and died at 52 in 1986. He was "extravagantly mourned," is buried under a granite "five ring" mortuary tower, and was featured on a Japanese postage stamp in 1997.
A Day Trip from Tokyo
Crazed Fruit takes place on the Miura peninsula, about 60 minutes south of Tokyo by rail line. On the west side of the peninsula are the beaches of Hayama Isshiki and Zushi. The famous Buddhist shrine at Kamakura is a little to the north in the hills overlooking the Pacific, also on the west side of the promontory.
To reach Hayama, take the JR Shonan-Shinjuka line from downtown Tokyo. Get off the train a Zishu after about a 60 to 65 minute ride south of the metropolis. Zushi is a small village. The train stop is three miles south of Kamakura and one mile to the north of Hayama. If you intend to go Hayama Isshiki beach, the nicest on the peninsula, take the Keikyu bus unless you want to walk. In the film, people arrive and depart at the Zushi station; then, they have to take a hot rod to the beach area. Hayama Isshiki beach is where the emperor has his summer palace and the beach is kept pristine in honor of the imperial royal family.
Route 134, a famous Japanese highway snakes along the western coast. This is the main road linking Kamakura, Zushi, and Hayama as well as other notable sites on the west side of the peninsula. Since the construction of the rail lines around the turn of the 20th century, excursions to Hayama and its adjacent regions, including Kamakura, have been a popular day-trip from Tokyo. (In the summer, Tokyo is very hot and humid; the air quality is often bad and the beaches between the metropolis and Yokohama (and Kawasaki) on the eastern side of the Miura peninsula are said to be grotesquely overcrowded and fetid. Route 134 looks similar in places to the Highway 1 in California – it runs along the beach in many areas at the base of a high sandy bluff. The appearance of the bluff is identical with the unstable sandy bluffs overlooking Malibu and Santa Monica beaches in California. These picturesque bluffs have often appeared as a backdrop in Japanese films. In Crazed Fruit, there are several shots showing a particularly high bluff near Hayama; this same bluff features in a number of important sequences in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1930 gangster film Walk Cheerfully – the young gangster hero motors up coastal highway with his girlfriend and her kid sister; she drops a kewpie doll that the passing cars flatten. The Hayama area has always been a place where ancient Japan intersects picturesquely with the modern world. Japanese audiences would understand that the hills and bays around Hayama are sacred – the living God, the Emperor and his family frequented those waters. But since the area was a resort town it has always been a show-place for modernity – the peninsula was famous for water-skiing and jazz clubs as shown in Crazed Fruit. In Ozu’s Walk Cheerfully, the hero has a picnic with his girlfriend at the shrine to the great bronze Buddha in Kamakura. The film shows the hoodlum’s jalopy parked so close to the huge Buddha that it looks as if the meditating figure is cradling the Model T in his lap.
Madame Butterfly
Kim Lockhart’s father, Kay Lockhart, was a navy fighter pilot. He was stationed in Japan. Like most of the American soldiers in Japan, he acquired a 19 year old girlfriend, Michiko. His account of his relationship is attached to this note. In his memoir, Lockhart indicates that he was with this young woman, a survivor of Hiroshima, for six months. He paid her 100 dollars a month for her to be his mistress. Lockhart explains that Japan is very caste-conscious; attractive young Japanese women saw "Americans as a resource and a way out of their caste." Although Lockhart was very fond of Michiko, his "middle-class background couldn’t allow (him) to bring her home" when his active duty ended. He simply abandoned her without a face-to-face farewell – "and I have felt guilty my whole life about the way our relationship ended."
Lockhart returned to St. Paul. He had learned to fly before he learned to drive a car. Back in St. Paul, he lived with his parents and worked bagging groceries at a local supermarket. It was "almost as if those navy years had never existed." Later, Kay Lockhart studied at MIT, became a famous architect in the Twin Cities, working for Ralph Rapson (the designer of the old Guthrie Theater) and teaching at the University of Minnesota. His memoir is called Flying with the Navy 1949 - 1952. It is a very interesting short book.
John Donne on a love scene in "Crazed Fruit"
As ‘twixt to equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls (which to advance their state
Were gone out) hung ‘twixt her, and me.
And whilst our souls negotiate there
We like sepulchral statues lay:
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.
Quiz – Delinquency
2. This 1978 documentary narrated by Peter Falk involved convicted lifers bullying juvenile delinquents in an attempt to " ________ them ________".
3. The above-referenced documentary launched many sequels with the same general name and premise, some of which the most highly rated shows in their seasons. In 2011, the Justice Department concluded that this program was (a) a great success in its objective; (b) it’s success could not be statistically determined; ( c ) not only unsuccessful but seriously harmful.
4. James Dean flees to what Los Angeles landmark in the final scenes of the 1955 picture Rebel without a Cause: _____________.
5. Frederic Wertham in his famous book The Seduction of the Innocent (1954) argued that ________________ caused juvenile delinquency. Congress held hearings to determine if he was right about this theory. (He wasn’t; in 2011, a statistician studying Wertham’s records showed that he had "cooked" the numbers.)
6. In Harmony Korinne’s Spring Breakers, (2014) Selena Gomez and the other three girls on spring break appear in Court in their brightly colored _____________.
7. In The Blackboard Jungle, (1955) a brave principal (played by Glenn Ford) fights back against the anti-social behavior of his students led by a African-american youth played by ___________________. This movie features the menacing "Rock Around the Clock" recorded by ______________________.
8. _____________________ plays the alluring sociopathic reform school girl, the titular Kitten with a Whip (1964).
9. The punk band, ____________________ leads a high school rebellion at Vince Lombardi High resulting in apocalyptic destruction in the Roger Corman-produced Rock and Roll High School (1979).
10. Action and his Jets sing a mocking song about Sergeant Krupke. At the end of the song, they jeer "Gee, Officer Krupke, _____________!"
Sunday, June 28, 2015
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch (reflecting on Existence)
Poised midway between a horror film and Buster Keaton comedy, Roy Andersson's A Pigeon sat on a Branch (reflecting on Existence) (2014) is intermittently very funny. But it is also disturbing, a essay on human life too clear-sighted and penetrating to shrug off. The gags all have an edge that is not merely ironic, nor simply satirical, but, rather, tragic. Comedy, particularly of the absurdist kind motivating Andersson, can be cruel and mean-spirited. Somehow, Andersson avoids this trap. His film is autumnal, glacially cold, and, yet, also, oddly warmhearted, compassionate, and melancholy.
A Pigeon... is the third of a trilogy of films about "what it means to be a human being." The first two films were Songs from the Second Story (2000) and You, the Living (2007), both astounding pictures and similar in form and dead-pan content to this movie. Andersson is Scandinavia's most famous director of television commercials and he constructs his films from small vignettes, each two to four minutes long -- the vignettes are shot from a motionless camera peering into rooms, corridors, or curiously claustrophobic city streets. Andersson decorates the studio sets where his action takes place with the fanatic and obsessive attention to detail of a TV ad-man -- someone accustomed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sixty-second commercial. Each detail in the image is precisely considered and everything is clearly lit: all spaces are exactly articulated into foreground and background, usually a remarkably beautiful landscape of vacant lots or industrial wasteland that seems to have been painted in astounding detail. At the Bell Museum on the University of Minnesota, there are darkened galleries with big living-room-sized dioramas where stuffed animals glare out at you with glass eyes -- the animals are posed in their characteristic habitat amidst detailed rock outcroppings and foliage, distant landscapes painted with trompe l'oeil exactitude close off the lighted boxes where the embalmed and stuffed specimens are displayed. Watching Andersson's film is eerily akin to looking into those displays in the Natural History Museum -- except here we are seeing homo sapiens posed in their habitats, engaged in their customary absurd, or cruel, or futile, pursuits. A Pigeon...like the other films in the sequence has no close-ups, no montage, no moving camera -- the people in the shot often stand motionlessly, contemplating some calamity that has just occurred or that seems about to occur. Andersson's actors are, often, elderly, generally very ordinary in appearance, wearing shabby, genteel clothing and their faces are stark white, the pallor of a waxen corpse; the people move robotically or shamble along like zombies. Each sequence consists of a single shot, designed with terrifying precision. The soundtrack is comprised of a clumsy, club-footed waltz that sometimes plays between sequences, a heartbreaking folk ballad and some singing with the sound of a pigeon cooing off-screen sometimes audible. As far as I can determine, every shot (except one) was made indoors on a sound-stage -- the street shots have the strange, stylized clarity of a Balthus' still life. In only one sequence does the director license himself to use a reaction shot -- and that sequence, which is horrifying, turns out to be a dream, albeit one that seems to invest the entire project with its aura.
Here is an example of the film's peculiar tone: An old man sits alone in a café below street level in Gothenberg. The other patrons at the café, which is also a tavern, ignore him; everyone seems equally miserable, alone, and isolated, although the establishment is surprisingly clean and, even, elegant in its décor. (Whatever its level of existential Angst, Sweden is appallingly clean and tidy.) The waitress has to shout in the old man's ear to communicate with him. She tells one of the other patrons that he has come into the bar every night for 60 years to have his evening shot of whiskey or, I suppose, aquavit. In the next shot, we see the bar from the same angle but it is now 1943: a waitress sings a song about pouring shots for her patrons -- the tune to which she sings is incongruously "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". The patrons also sing in response to her melody, an operatic male chorus. Then, the waitress, also the tavern's proprietor, sings that she will pour shots for those without money in exchange for a kiss. The men line up to kiss the limping bar-owner, the name of the tavern is "Limping Lotte's in Gothenberg" and she dispenses shots to each of them. The film cuts back to the present-day and we see the old man, now scarcely able to move himself, slowly limping out of the tavern -- the waitress shouts "Good Night" to him three times, but the old man is so deaf, he doesn't hear her until the last time she bellows those words to him. "Good night!" he gruffly responds, Under this scene, we hear the music from the preceding image titled as "1943" continuing. At first, the effect of this sequence is grotesque, then, funny, then, strangely poignant -- is the old man remembering something from his youth? Is he fantasizing the exchange of kisses for shots of aquavit? The effect is to create a sense that the old man has a rich interior life almost entirely bottled up inside of him -- he's the kind of nondescript old man to whom we would pay no attention at all; and, yet, like the dour and apparently uncommunicative film, there are great riches within him to be explored. Like everyone else, he contains an entire universe -- and one that is about to be extinguished by death. For death, it seems, is the presence that illumines everything in the picture and gives the images meaning -- the movie begins with three scenes labeled, "Three Encounters with Death". In the first, a fat old man topples over clutching his heart while attempting to uncork a bottle of wine: the snow falls outside the window and the man's wife, running some kind of food processor or grinder, pays no attention to her husband's death in the shot's foreground. In the second sequence, an old woman lies dying in a hospital bed while her elderly children sit around silently glaring at her. The old woman is holding a big purse over her chest like a shield and has told those attending the vigil that she intends to take it with her to heaven. The purse is full of jewels, we are told, and money and, when the woman's bossy son, tries to wrest it from her grasp, she squeals in a high-pitched voice and won't release the purse, the hospital bed, on castor-wheels rolling this way and that during the struggle. Then, we see a cafeteria on a ferry -- a dead man lies on the floor where two stewards have just abandoned attempts to resuscitate him. The ferry's captain stand overlooking the scene. A matronly cashier notes that the dead man has paid for his shrimp cocktail and beer and wonders what to do with it. "Give it away," the captain says. The cashier asks if any of the people in the cafeteria want the dead man's food. One plump fellow is a suit raises his hand in an abashed sort of way and says: "I guess I'll take his beer," slowly crossing the ferry to take the mug of beer back to his table, where he drinks it.
Andersson's film is complex with interactions of various kinds between the sketches -- the ship captain, later, appears as a rather crazed-looking barber, announcing that he has retired from his profession on the sea. He takes a call (the same call that everyone else in the film gets) and his sole customer flees. This customer turns out to be Jonathan, one of two hapless door-to-door salesmen. They carry valises full of vampire fangs ("ordinary and extra-long"), laugh boxes that hoot maniacally when they are squeezed ("a real classic" one of the salesman notes) and a mask of a nightmarish figure called "Uncle One Tooth" that is so hideous that it terrifies customers into fleeing the room. Of course, no one wants their merchandise and those who have purchased it on credit refuse to pay them for these wares. The two salesmen live in a horrible-looking boarding house that is more like a prison than a place of ordinary dwelling -- their creditors come to hound them in this institution, reasonable recompense since we have seen them relentlessly dunning the owners of a novelty shop who owe them money. The two salesmen provide the film with a kind of narrative, albeit one that is relentlessly grim. In Andersson's world, all human pretension comes to naught. In one scene, the King of Sweden on a great charger enters the bar with his lieutenants -- long lines of troops marching toward some 18th century battle with the "wily Russian" pass the tavern's 21st century window. The King of Sweden commands that his officers drive all the women from the bar at the point of the sword -- the two novelty salesman cower against the wall. A man playing a pinball machine is "given the taste of the lash"; he is mercilessly lashed, while the handsome young prince flirts with a boy working as a bartender. Later, the King returns to the tavern, his troops staggering past the window in rags, wounded, one man in bandages leading three troops who have been blinded, carts full of casualties dragged down the street. This time the King asks to use the toilet. "No, he will have to wait," the bartender says. "It is occupied."
Andersson's film is at its best, when it doesn't strain for meaning. There are two particularly beautiful scenes involving lovers that brought tears to my eyes -- in one sequence, a young man and woman are reclining at a beach; the young man cautiously gropes the girl who pretends to be asleep. A big black Labrador dog watches over the couple, restlessly changing position and providing the only real motion in the tableaux. In another sequence, a man with a strangely comical-looking face, a sort of broad, sad-faced clown's visage, morosely looks down from the window of a shabby apartment. A beautiful young woman joins him in the window and shares a cigarette with him. These two scenes surrounded by much grotesque and dismal (if funny) material stand out for their kindness, simplicity, and inexplicable beauty. A sequence in which stereotypical Africans, black silhouettes seen in profile as if figures in a Kara Walker painting, are forced into a immense bronze drum and, then, roasted alive to create a kind of mournful music -- something like a choral work by Arvo Part broadcast from the spinning barrel by trumpet-like extrusions -- seemed to me to belong in a different movie. The sequence has a horrible Kafkaesque power -- it is like a version of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" -- but it seems overly explicit, particularly when a group of superannuated folks appear on a terrace, apparently at an adjacent manor to watch the spectacle while drinking champagne poured into their fluted glasses by one of the novelty salesmen. (The shot of these old people enjoying the spectacle of the roasted African slaves and featuring people in evening gowns and tuxedos -- one of the men looks just like Viktor Sjostrom in Bergman's Wild Strawberries -- also seems incongruent with the rest of the picture, an effect that is signified in two ways: first, this image is the only reaction shot in the whole film and, second, the salesman pouring the champagne says, in the next scene, that the vision of the musical barrel spinning in the hellish flames was a nightmare. More effective, I think, is a horrific image of a crucified chimpanzee being tortured by electrical shocks -- some bloody rags and basins visible in the foreground like the furnishings to a medieval Passion -- while a lab assistant chats on the phone, answering a call that all of the characters receive at one time or another: the call requires the person speaking to say -- "I'm glad to hear that you are doing fine," presumably, something that people repeat to one another over and over again since, of course, in Andersson's film, no one (except the two pairs of lovers) is doing fine at all.
A Pigeon... is the third of a trilogy of films about "what it means to be a human being." The first two films were Songs from the Second Story (2000) and You, the Living (2007), both astounding pictures and similar in form and dead-pan content to this movie. Andersson is Scandinavia's most famous director of television commercials and he constructs his films from small vignettes, each two to four minutes long -- the vignettes are shot from a motionless camera peering into rooms, corridors, or curiously claustrophobic city streets. Andersson decorates the studio sets where his action takes place with the fanatic and obsessive attention to detail of a TV ad-man -- someone accustomed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sixty-second commercial. Each detail in the image is precisely considered and everything is clearly lit: all spaces are exactly articulated into foreground and background, usually a remarkably beautiful landscape of vacant lots or industrial wasteland that seems to have been painted in astounding detail. At the Bell Museum on the University of Minnesota, there are darkened galleries with big living-room-sized dioramas where stuffed animals glare out at you with glass eyes -- the animals are posed in their characteristic habitat amidst detailed rock outcroppings and foliage, distant landscapes painted with trompe l'oeil exactitude close off the lighted boxes where the embalmed and stuffed specimens are displayed. Watching Andersson's film is eerily akin to looking into those displays in the Natural History Museum -- except here we are seeing homo sapiens posed in their habitats, engaged in their customary absurd, or cruel, or futile, pursuits. A Pigeon...like the other films in the sequence has no close-ups, no montage, no moving camera -- the people in the shot often stand motionlessly, contemplating some calamity that has just occurred or that seems about to occur. Andersson's actors are, often, elderly, generally very ordinary in appearance, wearing shabby, genteel clothing and their faces are stark white, the pallor of a waxen corpse; the people move robotically or shamble along like zombies. Each sequence consists of a single shot, designed with terrifying precision. The soundtrack is comprised of a clumsy, club-footed waltz that sometimes plays between sequences, a heartbreaking folk ballad and some singing with the sound of a pigeon cooing off-screen sometimes audible. As far as I can determine, every shot (except one) was made indoors on a sound-stage -- the street shots have the strange, stylized clarity of a Balthus' still life. In only one sequence does the director license himself to use a reaction shot -- and that sequence, which is horrifying, turns out to be a dream, albeit one that seems to invest the entire project with its aura.
Here is an example of the film's peculiar tone: An old man sits alone in a café below street level in Gothenberg. The other patrons at the café, which is also a tavern, ignore him; everyone seems equally miserable, alone, and isolated, although the establishment is surprisingly clean and, even, elegant in its décor. (Whatever its level of existential Angst, Sweden is appallingly clean and tidy.) The waitress has to shout in the old man's ear to communicate with him. She tells one of the other patrons that he has come into the bar every night for 60 years to have his evening shot of whiskey or, I suppose, aquavit. In the next shot, we see the bar from the same angle but it is now 1943: a waitress sings a song about pouring shots for her patrons -- the tune to which she sings is incongruously "The Battle Hymn of the Republic". The patrons also sing in response to her melody, an operatic male chorus. Then, the waitress, also the tavern's proprietor, sings that she will pour shots for those without money in exchange for a kiss. The men line up to kiss the limping bar-owner, the name of the tavern is "Limping Lotte's in Gothenberg" and she dispenses shots to each of them. The film cuts back to the present-day and we see the old man, now scarcely able to move himself, slowly limping out of the tavern -- the waitress shouts "Good Night" to him three times, but the old man is so deaf, he doesn't hear her until the last time she bellows those words to him. "Good night!" he gruffly responds, Under this scene, we hear the music from the preceding image titled as "1943" continuing. At first, the effect of this sequence is grotesque, then, funny, then, strangely poignant -- is the old man remembering something from his youth? Is he fantasizing the exchange of kisses for shots of aquavit? The effect is to create a sense that the old man has a rich interior life almost entirely bottled up inside of him -- he's the kind of nondescript old man to whom we would pay no attention at all; and, yet, like the dour and apparently uncommunicative film, there are great riches within him to be explored. Like everyone else, he contains an entire universe -- and one that is about to be extinguished by death. For death, it seems, is the presence that illumines everything in the picture and gives the images meaning -- the movie begins with three scenes labeled, "Three Encounters with Death". In the first, a fat old man topples over clutching his heart while attempting to uncork a bottle of wine: the snow falls outside the window and the man's wife, running some kind of food processor or grinder, pays no attention to her husband's death in the shot's foreground. In the second sequence, an old woman lies dying in a hospital bed while her elderly children sit around silently glaring at her. The old woman is holding a big purse over her chest like a shield and has told those attending the vigil that she intends to take it with her to heaven. The purse is full of jewels, we are told, and money and, when the woman's bossy son, tries to wrest it from her grasp, she squeals in a high-pitched voice and won't release the purse, the hospital bed, on castor-wheels rolling this way and that during the struggle. Then, we see a cafeteria on a ferry -- a dead man lies on the floor where two stewards have just abandoned attempts to resuscitate him. The ferry's captain stand overlooking the scene. A matronly cashier notes that the dead man has paid for his shrimp cocktail and beer and wonders what to do with it. "Give it away," the captain says. The cashier asks if any of the people in the cafeteria want the dead man's food. One plump fellow is a suit raises his hand in an abashed sort of way and says: "I guess I'll take his beer," slowly crossing the ferry to take the mug of beer back to his table, where he drinks it.
Andersson's film is complex with interactions of various kinds between the sketches -- the ship captain, later, appears as a rather crazed-looking barber, announcing that he has retired from his profession on the sea. He takes a call (the same call that everyone else in the film gets) and his sole customer flees. This customer turns out to be Jonathan, one of two hapless door-to-door salesmen. They carry valises full of vampire fangs ("ordinary and extra-long"), laugh boxes that hoot maniacally when they are squeezed ("a real classic" one of the salesman notes) and a mask of a nightmarish figure called "Uncle One Tooth" that is so hideous that it terrifies customers into fleeing the room. Of course, no one wants their merchandise and those who have purchased it on credit refuse to pay them for these wares. The two salesmen live in a horrible-looking boarding house that is more like a prison than a place of ordinary dwelling -- their creditors come to hound them in this institution, reasonable recompense since we have seen them relentlessly dunning the owners of a novelty shop who owe them money. The two salesmen provide the film with a kind of narrative, albeit one that is relentlessly grim. In Andersson's world, all human pretension comes to naught. In one scene, the King of Sweden on a great charger enters the bar with his lieutenants -- long lines of troops marching toward some 18th century battle with the "wily Russian" pass the tavern's 21st century window. The King of Sweden commands that his officers drive all the women from the bar at the point of the sword -- the two novelty salesman cower against the wall. A man playing a pinball machine is "given the taste of the lash"; he is mercilessly lashed, while the handsome young prince flirts with a boy working as a bartender. Later, the King returns to the tavern, his troops staggering past the window in rags, wounded, one man in bandages leading three troops who have been blinded, carts full of casualties dragged down the street. This time the King asks to use the toilet. "No, he will have to wait," the bartender says. "It is occupied."
Andersson's film is at its best, when it doesn't strain for meaning. There are two particularly beautiful scenes involving lovers that brought tears to my eyes -- in one sequence, a young man and woman are reclining at a beach; the young man cautiously gropes the girl who pretends to be asleep. A big black Labrador dog watches over the couple, restlessly changing position and providing the only real motion in the tableaux. In another sequence, a man with a strangely comical-looking face, a sort of broad, sad-faced clown's visage, morosely looks down from the window of a shabby apartment. A beautiful young woman joins him in the window and shares a cigarette with him. These two scenes surrounded by much grotesque and dismal (if funny) material stand out for their kindness, simplicity, and inexplicable beauty. A sequence in which stereotypical Africans, black silhouettes seen in profile as if figures in a Kara Walker painting, are forced into a immense bronze drum and, then, roasted alive to create a kind of mournful music -- something like a choral work by Arvo Part broadcast from the spinning barrel by trumpet-like extrusions -- seemed to me to belong in a different movie. The sequence has a horrible Kafkaesque power -- it is like a version of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" -- but it seems overly explicit, particularly when a group of superannuated folks appear on a terrace, apparently at an adjacent manor to watch the spectacle while drinking champagne poured into their fluted glasses by one of the novelty salesmen. (The shot of these old people enjoying the spectacle of the roasted African slaves and featuring people in evening gowns and tuxedos -- one of the men looks just like Viktor Sjostrom in Bergman's Wild Strawberries -- also seems incongruent with the rest of the picture, an effect that is signified in two ways: first, this image is the only reaction shot in the whole film and, second, the salesman pouring the champagne says, in the next scene, that the vision of the musical barrel spinning in the hellish flames was a nightmare. More effective, I think, is a horrific image of a crucified chimpanzee being tortured by electrical shocks -- some bloody rags and basins visible in the foreground like the furnishings to a medieval Passion -- while a lab assistant chats on the phone, answering a call that all of the characters receive at one time or another: the call requires the person speaking to say -- "I'm glad to hear that you are doing fine," presumably, something that people repeat to one another over and over again since, of course, in Andersson's film, no one (except the two pairs of lovers) is doing fine at all.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
We are the Best!
At the end of Lukas Moodysohn's 2014 We are the Best! an outraged crowd shrieks at three thirteen-year girls, calling them "Punk cunts!" It's a measure of the easy-going benignity of We are the Best! that this insult represents a happy ending to the film. In fact, in the eyes of three teenage heroines, these words sound as an encomium -- they have achieved what they set out to do. Moodysohn's modest little film apparently derives from a graphic novel apparently written by his daughter, and concerns three seventh-grade girls who aspire to form a punk rock band. It is 1982 and disco reigns and the girls, with their unappealing haircuts, are regarded as outsider losers by their peers. At school, they sullenly refuse to participate in sports and, in fact, are inspired to form their band by their hatred of the PA teacher and their contempt for basketball. At a dingy Stockholm youth center, two of the girls seize control of the place's bass guitar and drums when the local hair band, something called Iron Fist, forgets to sign up for the rehearsal room. The two girls, Bobo and Klara, have less than zero musical talent and no idea how to play their instruments but they can make noise on them and that is enough as far as they are concerned. A third girl, also despised by the other kids because she is a Christian, knows how to play guitar -- at one point, she sings "Kum-bay-yah" -- and Bobo and Klara recruit her for their band, hacking off her long blonde hair to make her look like them, that is, like boys with bad, spiky haircuts. We are the Best! is casually shot and resolutely faithful to its anarchic, punk sensibility -- nothing is proven in the movie, no hearts or minds are changed about anything, and Klara and Bobo never do learn to play their instruments. There is a vestigial plot about the girls competing for an equally hapless and forlorn group of boys in a punk band, but that narrative exists merely to confirm the ultimate loyalty of the heroines to one another. The closest thing that the film offers to a narrative arc is the girl's half-hearted participation in something called "Santa Rock", a rock and roll "battle of the bands" in a suburb called Vasteras. While the kids in Iron Fist smirk, the girls take the stage, unleash their anthem about detesting High School sports, and, when the crowd begins hurling insults at them, improve the chorus to their song , changing it from"Hate, Hate, Hate, Sport" to "Hate, Hate, Hate, Vasteras!" -- this predictably leads to a riot, the girls screaming invective as the crowd tries to storm the stage and shut them down. This is the film's happy ending. On the bus returning to Stockholm, the girls tell the two dudes who are the teen center counselors: "We are the best!" The dimwitted counselors respond: "No you are the worst! Iron Fist is the best!" and the film ends. I like a number of things about this movie -- it's bluntly realistic, without being hysterical or maudlin, about the cruelty of teenagers: everyone casually bullies everyone else including the two loser heroines who relentlessly bully the Christian girl who has joined their band. The adults shown in the film are not evil nor do they misunderstand the girls -- they are simply irrelevant to anything important in their lives. (We see the adults, all of them cheerful and good-looking thirty-somethings, playing 'spin-the-bottle' and getting loaded at various unpleasant parties.) The girls don't miraculously become anything like good musicians for the climactic concert -- they remain pathetically untalented and clueless. And, of course, there's no heartwarming validation by an audience that the girls have achieved anything. There is not much in the movie and it has no ambitions to speak of -- it's not Zero de Conduit that's for sure. But there's truth in the movie, the people seem real, and it's not mean-spirited: people are stupid but not wicked. And, if you're interested in punk rock, the film is imbued with the spirit of that music.
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