Paterson is the rarest of all thing -- a film about a poet that is actually poetic. Exceedingly sweet and gentle, Jim Jarmusch's movie is a kind a lyric poem itself.
Lyric poetry is not generally narrative -- a lyric poems presents us with an emotionally inflected situation or encounter, not a story. Similarly, Paterson is without much in the way of a conventional plot -- the film simply chronicles one week in the life of its hero, a bus driver born and raised in Paterson, New Jersey who is, himself, named Paterson. The bus-man is married to an extraordinarily beautiful, if eccentric woman who seems to be Iranian -- she mentions a dream that takes place in Persia. The bus-man is an artist -- he writes short unassuming poems in his spare-time and has a small office in the basement of his tiny home where he labors on his literary work. (He writes in longhand in "a secret notebook" and one of the aspects of the movie offputting to Millenials is that the hero doesn't have a computer or, even, a cell-phone -- this makes him completely implausible to young people and too weird to be sympathetic. My son's first comment about the movie was: "They don't seem to know about social media.") The third member of the bus driver's household, and just as important as the husband and wife, is a fat, rather malevolent English bulldog -- the beast is cute, but turns out to be supremely malicious and the hero's obvious distrust of the dog is more than warranted.
Jarmusch is a film poet and he grasps that a movie without a plot needs, nonetheless, to be rigorously structured. The structure is supervisory -- it keeps the film from slipping into shapelessness. Accordingly, the movie is divided into seven approximately equal episodes, one for each day. Each day begins with an overhead shot of the hero in bed with his wife. The hero's discipline is also impressive: without an alarm clock, he always wakes around 6:15 am, checks his watch, nuzzles his slumbering wife, and, then, eats a bowl of Cheerios. (The round cereal rhymes with black circles with which his wife decorates their home as well as with the cupcakes that she makes, also frosted with white and black circular forms. The black and white, similarly, rhymes with an old black and white movie that the couple watch at a nearby theater -- it's The Island of Lost Souls, an adaptation of H. G. Wells Island of Dr. Moreau. The panther woman in the thirties horror film has lustrous black hair and looks very much like the poet's wife, a resemblance on which he remarks. It is on the basis of these visual rhymes or correspondences that the film progresses and they are probably innumerable -- on first viewing, my guess is that I noticed only the most obvious of them. Another example must suffice: the hero's wife dreams of twins and tells the poet about this dream: throughout the movie, the hero encounters many twins, perhaps five separate couples -- again a system of visual rhymes manifested in the "twin-ness" itself.) Each morning, the busdriver walks to work through a Victorian industrial compound, encounters his boss, a morose Indian overwhelmed by a sea of troubles, and, then, drives his bus through the streets of Paterson -- he operates the #23 line and, apparently, is a very capable and accomplished bus driver. Returning home, the hero sets upright his mailbox post that is always knocked awry (it turns out that the bulldog, whose malice is boundless, goes outside each noon and butts the mail box off-kilter), eats dinner with his wife and, then, takes the dog for a walk. The walk always includes tethering the dog to the outside of meter at a tavern where the hero has one beer and interacts with people from the neighborhood -- there are a couple of very tentative subplots involving people at the bar but they are only minimally developed. Every day is like every other day -- the hero hears fragments of conversations that interest him on the bus (a boy- and girl-anarchist discussing an Italian assassin from Paterson, some kids talking about Hurricane Carter, a couple of men discussing women). The electrical system on his bus fails and he has to shepherd his fares onto a new bus -- three people mention that it's lucky the bus didn't explode into "a fireball." Sometimes, the hero sits in the park and looks at the great waterfall plunging through its ragged, dark gorge among the ancient millworks. It is this waterfall, of course, that is central to William Carlos Williams modernist epic, also named Paterson, and the viewer should know that Williams' book-length poem involves a sleeping giant similar to HCE in Finnegan's Wake who is also known as Paterson and who embodies the characteristics and history of the city. Thus, the hero is related to both the city where he has been born and lives, Williams' poem, a continuous reference point throughout the film, and himself seems to embrace those qualities that are significant to the city. (The city was also the home of Alan Ginsberg and Alexander Hamilton as well as Lou Costello -- these people and others are name-checked by the film). Adam Driver, ubiquitous on the Silver Screen this season, plays the poet-bus driver and his muted, simple good will is intrinsic to the movie's appeal.
William Carlos Williams famously said that there are "no ideas but in things." (This dicta is quoted in the film). The movie invites the viewer to look at the things shown and make his or her own short, lyric poems. We find ourselves scrutinizing the imagery, much consisting of Ozu-like "empty frames" (that is, still lives), and wondering to what extent a sensibility like the hero, or like ourselves in the mood of poetic reverie could use those things to make a poem. In effect, the movie generously enforces upon the viewer the duties of the poet. The verse in the film is by the poet Ron Padgett -- to me, the little poems are mere bagatelles, mildly amusing on a sub-Billy Collins level. This is to say that the poems actually displayed by the film didn't particularly impress me. But this isn't the point. The purpose of Jarmusch's exercise to embed the viewer within a poet's imagination -- although the verse may be "written on water" as the hero says (citing Keats' epitaph), the pleasure of inhabiting the hero's lyric sensibility is a profound one.
This is one of the best films of the year.
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Sweet Revenge
On the evidence of Sweet Revenge (1976), director Jerry Schatzberg had all the impulses of a first-rate maker of drive-in exploitation films. Sweet Revenge involves car theft, has an appealing mixed race cast jiving in funky urban settings, and inserts gratuitous tits and ass into the proceedings. Early in the film, the heroine, played by Stockard Channing, gets busted for theft. She's transported to a jail where nasty-looking matrons literally hose down writhing naked girls -- there's about a half-dozen nude prisoners on display. Channing herself is coy about nudity, but she's always stripping down on the edge of the frame and slinking away into Vilmos Zsigmond's murky gloom. So Schatzberg's got the chops and, in fact, his reflex is to go lurid. But the picture has pretentions to be something more than a car crime film and, in fact, was entered in the competition at Cannes -- and, therein, lies the problem. Channing plays a delinquent girl who yearns for a Ferrari. The film is a lame parable about false values and the script makes it blindingly obvious that the Ferrari symbolizes middle-class respectability to the poor waif. And, so, the heroine concocts an elaborate scheme to steal and, then, re-steal the same vehicle four or five times -- her plan is to sell the vehicle after each theft and accumulate enough money to buy the car outright. The girl has a dimwitted boyfriend with whom she casually shoplifts -- he pesters her about sex but she remarks "the screwing part is over." A public defender played by the very young Sam Waterston yearns to mentor the girl -- this "mentoring" involves lots of lectures and stalking, Vertigo-style cruising around in sordid neighborhoods. The cast is jam-packed with amusing low-lifes, a demi-monde of hustlers and thieves of all sorts and this cadre of Luftmenschen lives in squats of various kinds in the old Native American ghetto on Bunker Hill, a milieu picturesquely lensed by Zsigmond -- decaying Victorian mansions perched over vacant lots with the monuments of the city arrayed across the polluted basin below. The movie goes nowhere and it's so laid-back that the narrative is, more or less, invisible. Zsigmond seems determined to shoot as many scenes as possible with as little light as practicable -- the movie's locations are a congeries of cavernous parking ramps, dark bars, and dimly lit interiors, rooms always about to be demolished and so with water and electricity cut off to them. Whenever possible, Zsigmond complicates the picture plane -- the entire first sequence introduces the main characters as a translucent reflection on the showroom glass behind which the Ferrari is displayed. Like much of the camerawork, it's impressive and symbolic to a fault (the girl's features resting a like pinkish haze over the Ferrari behind the glass), but not particularly dramatic or expressive. This is the problem with the entire picture -- it's only moderately interesting because the impulses of the characters and narrative are always entrapped in the schematic exposition of false materialistic values that the film dramatizes. The story yields to allegory -- almost never a favorable development. Channing is suitably feral and, certainly, not at all attractive -- she looks heavy-set and fiercely determined and wears unattractive clothes: she's a kind of girl mechanic, a ferocious tom-boy. It's hard to imagine her as a Hollywood star, but her next role was as Rizzo in Grease.
TCM presented the picture as a package of films featuring Vilmos Zsigmond's camerawork. The movie preceding Sweet Revenge was Spielberg's maiden feature film, Sugarland Express, a much more impressive picture. Since Sugarland Express (1970) is a road movie, it is more brightly lit and, therefore, feels more open and intelligible. In both pictures, however, Zsigmond shows an unseemly fascination with reflections on glass and chrome and each movie ends with figures silhouetted against bright light, orange flame in Sweet Revenge and the glittering water of the Rio Grande in Sugarland Express. It's interesting to compare John Williams' score for Sugarland Express with the movie music in Sweet Revenge. At least, in the climactic chase in Sugarland Express, Williams music is an inextricable part of the mise-en-scene -- the sequence feels choreographed to Williams' score and part of the sense of inexorable doom embodied in the film's last ten minutes derives from the way Spielberg locks the images to the music. It's an airless, if exciting and brilliantly orchestrated, Gesamtkunstwerk. By contrast, the music in Sweet Revenge is generally Muzak-filler, elevator music that you aren't really intended to notice except as the vaguest and most general cue toward an emotional response -- minor means plaintive; major means happy. Often the music in Sweet Revenge seems inordinately cheery in contrast with Zsigmond's moody and dark images. The music in Sugarland Express is timeless in that it doesn't signal an era -- by contrast, the score in Sweet Revenge is mid-seventies and recognizable as such in the course of one or two bars.
TCM presented the picture as a package of films featuring Vilmos Zsigmond's camerawork. The movie preceding Sweet Revenge was Spielberg's maiden feature film, Sugarland Express, a much more impressive picture. Since Sugarland Express (1970) is a road movie, it is more brightly lit and, therefore, feels more open and intelligible. In both pictures, however, Zsigmond shows an unseemly fascination with reflections on glass and chrome and each movie ends with figures silhouetted against bright light, orange flame in Sweet Revenge and the glittering water of the Rio Grande in Sugarland Express. It's interesting to compare John Williams' score for Sugarland Express with the movie music in Sweet Revenge. At least, in the climactic chase in Sugarland Express, Williams music is an inextricable part of the mise-en-scene -- the sequence feels choreographed to Williams' score and part of the sense of inexorable doom embodied in the film's last ten minutes derives from the way Spielberg locks the images to the music. It's an airless, if exciting and brilliantly orchestrated, Gesamtkunstwerk. By contrast, the music in Sweet Revenge is generally Muzak-filler, elevator music that you aren't really intended to notice except as the vaguest and most general cue toward an emotional response -- minor means plaintive; major means happy. Often the music in Sweet Revenge seems inordinately cheery in contrast with Zsigmond's moody and dark images. The music in Sugarland Express is timeless in that it doesn't signal an era -- by contrast, the score in Sweet Revenge is mid-seventies and recognizable as such in the course of one or two bars.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Fargo (Series 3)
Fargo on FX is Minnesota noir. Like True Detective, the series develops a single crime narrative across the course of the episodes broadcast. Each season features a different story and, therefore, a completely different cast of characters. The show is unified by its insistence that the action takes place in Minnesota and allusions to themes and stylistic tics characteristic of films directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. As in the films directed by Coen brothers, the series boasts fantastically evocative sound-cues and is brilliantly acted and shot -- there's no sloppy handheld cinema verite camerawork in this program: all shots are carefully composed and lit, generally involving a fixed camera, although, when the camera moves, it swoops and tracks and ascends gracefully. The high resolution imagery, often depicting wintry landscapes, has something of the meticulous hyper-realism of Stanley Kubrick's films. Thematically, Fargo insists on the surreal contrast between the niceness of the Minnesota characters, their willingness to help, and their stolid rural virtues and the sheer depravity of the villains who seek to exploit the good people's apparent naivety. Another feature characterizing these programs is their aura of unresolved mystery -- embedded in all of the episodes are minor elements that don't exactly make sense within the story. These riddles or punctum are sometimes resolved but, on other occasions, left mysterious. A notable example is the opening scene of the third series: the sequence is shot in German and involves the interrogation of a hapless suspect by a indifferent and sarcastic STASI officer in East Berlin. The suspect is accused of murdering a woman and the officer ignores all of his alibis -- in the distance, we can hear people faintly screaming in the Secret Police torture chambers. As the Kafkaesque interview continues, the camera loses interest, wanders to the side and slowly tracks toward a picture on the wall. The picture is a photograph of a cool, snowy woods and the camera enters that image to reveal that the grove of trees is adjacent to a large manor in Minnesota where a party is taking place in 2010. The titles appear and the narrative of Fargo proper then begins. In the first three episodes, nothing has been shown connecting the opening ten minutes in the STASI torture chamber in 1970 to the events comprising the plot in Minnesota -- it remains to be seen whether this element of indirection will be resolved.
The plot in the third season of Fargo amplifies the story of Cain and Abel -- in productions associated with the Coen brothers the book of Genesis is never remote and, indeed, often central to the action. Ewan McGregor plays two brothers, the Stussy's. One of the brothers is a sleazy probation officer in St. Cloud -- he's sleeping with one of his wards and connives a crime with her. The other brother is the so-called "Parking Lot King of Minnesota", a wealthy businessman who lives in an Eden Prairie manor -- my loyal readers will recall that Eden Prairie is my hometown. As in the Bible, the probation officer feels that his successful brother has cheated him of his patrimony. Accordingly, the probation officer blackmails a thug that he is supervising (the man has failed a "piss test" for drugs) into committing a home invasion of his brother's mansion. An ubiquitous theme in Coen brothers' productions is the stupidity of criminals and the criminal enterprise in general -- the Coen brothers often show crime as an outcome of ignorance, laziness, and, general, dim-wittedness and this show is no exception. The thug confuses Eden Prairie with Eden Valley, goes to the wrong place, and burglarizes the home of an elderly alcoholic, also named Stussy. In the course of burglary, the criminal glues shut the nose and mouth of the old man and, of course, he perishes. This is doubly ironic because the old man, although hiding under the pseudonym of Dennis Stussy, in fact, doesn't really have that name -- indeed, we discover that the old man is actually someone called Thaddeus Mobley. The abusive old man was briefly married to the mother of the town's police chief, the heroine in the series. The police chief is played by Carrie Coons and she is a woman of unremitting kindness and unassuming virtue, the moral fulcrum of the story. The police chief investigates the killing, which seems to be wholly senseless, and this leads her in the direction, ultimately, of the successful Stussy brother and his shabby sibling. As it happens, the Parking Lot King has borrowed a million dollars during a down-turn in his business from some shady investors. The investors have now materialized and claim a business stake in the Parking Lot King's enterprises. It's clear that these investors are profoundly evil -- they are represented by a lugubrious and sinister goon played by David Thewelis who seems the embodiment of a kind of ugly cruelty. Thewelis and his henchmen want to use the Stussy parking lot empire for money-laundering. It's clear that female police chief's investigation will suture together the murder plot involving the old man's death in Eden Valley and the plight of the Parking Lot King in Eden Prairie. How this will all work out remains to be seen. Last year's Fargo devolved into a series of idiotic, if brilliantly staged, shootouts and massacres. After one group of sleazy characters were slaughtered, the show would regenerate a whole new cast and, then, butcher them as well. And the whole thing was unduly repetitious, therefore, too long and implausible. So far the third series has remained within reasonable bounds of plausibility and, although many details are grotesque, the plot is interesting and driven by fascinating characters.
Although the merits of the series as a whole remains to be seen, I write in praise of the third episode, a generous interlude in the plot, a symbolic entr'acte and a lapidary, self-contained narrative gem, one of the best things ever broadcast on TV. In this episode, the Eden Valley police chief departs Minnesota and undertakes an investigation in Hollywood. She has discovered a secret trove of documents including novels apparently written by the old drunk under the name Thaddeus Mobley. Among those papers, the police chief has found a picture showing a young man with a Jewish film producer, a man named Bob Zimmerman (a nasty joke about a certain famous singer from Hibbing, Minnesota). The police chief flies to Hollywood and checks into a low-rent motel. By the sort of coincidence that often adorns Coen brothers' films, the police chief stays in Room 203, the same room where the young Thaddeus Mobley lived during the events that we are shown in this episode. The Hollywood sequence begins with a sweeping crane shot of congested freeways that seems to be extracted from LaLa Land and, then, Mobley's story is told in flashback as we follow the police chief's investigation. Thaddeus Mobley as a straight, clean-cut young man has won a prize for best science fiction novel in 1970. At a Scifi convention, he encounters the sleazy Zimmerman. Zimmerman is a fantastic villain, a vicious Jewish con-man played by Fred Melamed. (Melamed is the Coen brothers "go-to" character actor when they need to depict a duplicitous silver-tongued Jew and I never seen him in anything in which he is less than mesmerizing. In Fargo, Melamed is a suave seducer and he speaks in a repugnant dialect comprised of Hollywood argot, Yiddish, and Spanish. The man is deeply evil but also profoundly persuasive and oddly philosophical -- he is a moral nihilist but, at least, a self-conscious one. The way Melamed plays this role you can understand exactly how the young man falls under his spell.) Using the services of a harlot, also indelibly played by Francesca Eastwood, the youthful writer is persuaded to sign away his advances on his new novel and also the royalties on his previous books. He does this to finance a film project that Zimmerman has promoted, an attempt to adapt to the screen the writer's award-winning novel The Planet Wyh. Zimmerman uses both sex and cocaine to entangle the young man in his scheme and defraud him of his money. When the young man goes to his girlfriend's apartment to score some cocaine -- he is now addicted -- he finds Zimmerman present. It becomes obvious to him that Zimmerman and his erstwhile girlfriend have plotted to defraud him. The girl taunts the young writer and there is a fight. Zimmerman strangles the young man and, then, contemptuously hurls him onto the floor. But the youth is resilient. He gets up and beats Zimmerman half to death with the producer's own silver-handled cane. He is about to smash in the girls' face but stays his hand crying out "You are a bad person." Returning to Room 203 at the motel, the young man finds that he is covered in blood. He vomits and, while puking, sees the name "Dennis Stussy & Sons" stenciled into the porcelain rim of the toilet. Thus, we discover how Thaddeaus Mobley who is now packing his bags to escape to rural Minnesota, adopted the fatal name, Dennis Stussy.
The plot is simple enough and squalid, a nasty bit of verismo, but incidental aspects to the story open into a rich Coen brothers hall of mirrors, a system of strange allusions and exotic themes. On the plane to Hollywood, the police chief sits next to weary businessman. This man played by Ray Wise (he was Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) says that he is on his sixth flight of the week. "But it's only Tuesday," the police chief says. "Exactly," the man says. One of the themes central to the Coen brothers is that of the wanderer, the person who has no home -- this is a Jewish theme and most integrally expressed in the concept of the "wandering Jew." In Hollywood, a crook steals the chief's luggage. An LA detective takes a romantic interest in the heroine and, when he recovers her suitcase -- it's empty -- invites her to a bar. The cop turns out to be a smug Don Juan who bluntly propositions her. In the tavern, the heroine encounters the wandering businessman and he tells her a strange story about a woman who was both divorced and married at the same time. This tale implicates a Coen brothers obsession about unstable quantum states, most obviously dramatized in the reference to Schroedinger's Cat in A Serious Man -- the cat in the black box hypothesized by Schroedinger is both dead and alive at the same time. Quantum theory is also referenced in a speech delivered by the dying and feeble Zimmerman in the nursing home where he is now confined. Zimmerman has lost his larynx to cancer and speaks through a mechanical device that imparts to his words an eerie, prophetic timbre. Zimmerman says that all human encounters are merely collisions in which we suddenly become "real" but only for an instance. He remains an awful person and tells the police chief to "not let the door hit (her) as she leaves." Ultimately, the viewer perceives that the story is designed along three axes -- there is the indefatigable wanderer in the name of virtue, the police chief, the profound evil of Zimmerman and his girlfriend, and the hapless naïve virtue of a third strand to the narrative, the parable of the wandering robot MNSKY. MNSKY is a figure in Mobley's award-winning novel, a small, frail robot contrived for the purpose of being helpful. In simply, but effectively animated sequences, we see he robot's space ship crash land on earth where the little machine spends the next 2.7 million years wandering around trying to help people: "I can help!" the little robot chirps to everyone it meets. Of course, human life on earth is pretty much a terrible experiment -- there are ceaseless cruelties and massacres. At one point, some sadists tear off one of the robot's arms. "I can help!' the robot squeaks and, then, continues on his way. Later, space invaders destroy almost all life on earth -- the little robot tries to affix a corpse's hand to his mutilated shoulder. At last, some kindly scientists take possession of the battered robot -- they say that he is the oldest sentient being in the universe, over 2.7 million years, but, of course, it is unclear what the robot knows or can tell anyone. And we have never seen the robot help anyone. The scientists tell the robot to shut himself off and he obligingly opens his cranium where there is green light flashing. The light flashes on a switch that he shuts off, triggering another flash, this time red. It seems that throughout his entire travail, the robot had the power of shutting himself off but didn't exercise this faculty. In her motel room, the police chief has discovered a pair of abandoned men's shoes and an enigmatic box. This box comprises the central metaphor in the episode. The box has a switch on its top. When the switch is flipped, the box opens and a green light flashes. As the green light is flashing, a mechanical hand emerges from the box, reaches over to the switch, and flips it -- this causes the box's interior to momentarily flash red before the box shuts itself. Obviously, this weird self-canceling mechanism, correlates to the suicide feature in the robot -- the switch under his cranium -- and symbolizes the entire "self-canceling" project that has animated Mobley's wretched life: the man has canceled himself out because of his fear that he will be detained for the attack on Zimmerman. The box also seems to symbolize the helplessness of the robot, and the apparent hopelessness of the police chief's quest. MNSKY is both the wandering Jew but also "Minnesota Sky", a reference to the land of sky-blue waters as Minnesota is called, and, therefore, another correlate to the police chief who wants to help others, but is deterred from that objective. Further MNSKY and the police chief are also versions of the wandering and exhausted businessman encountered on the plane. Finally, elements of the plot harken back to the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink. In that movie, Fink is confined in a hellish hotel where he strives, unsuccessfully, to complete a screenplay. Some of the imagery in the episode is redolent of the movie -- particularly shots of long, empty and grim corridors or images of superannuated clerks approaching with enigmatic documents. The self-canceling aspect of the automaton, the box that exist only to shut itself off, also correlates, I think, to the notion of a writer's block, an inability to progress on a text that must be completed according to a certain deadline. These factors are all bound together in a kind of Borgesian meta-narrative -- the story of how Thaddeus Mobley became Dennis Stussy, something that the police chief discovers in the bewitched Room 203, opens into a system of references that encompasses a whole fictional world, indeed, a system of worlds. But, in the end, the episode cancels itself out -- the solution to the mystery, that is, how Mobley became Stussy, isn't significant in itself. It's another fact that has now been disclosed but it's a fact that seems capricious, arbitrary, one that has no real meaning -- the solution to the mystery doesn't lead anywhere at all. This is shown, I think by a brief shot depicting Mobley/Stussy in the box of his casket -- the corpse is lit to seem vaguely greenish like the ray emerging from the head of the robot and the automaton's box.
Near the end of the show, there is an ineffably sad scene. (The elegiac aspect in this episode relates to the sheer destructive passage of time.) The police officer sits in an deserted café interviewing an old waitress, all that remains of the glamor girl who betrayed the young and hopeful Thaddeus Mobley. Here the show's casting is brilliant and moving: the waitress is played by Frances Fisher and the seductress in 1970 is acted by Fisher's daughter, Francesca Eastwood. Of course, the women resemble one another closely and it is a profound image of how people age -- the old woman is recognizably the young vamp. (Francesca Eastwood plays her part with some of the cutting menace of her father, Clint Eastwood -- she has mean whispery gunslinger's voice.) The old waitress says: "He was right -- I'm not a good person." She pauses. "But he wasn't good either." The heroine has nothing to say to this remark and somberly gets up to leave the café. Earlier, the chief's deputy calls her and asks: "What are you doing in Hollywood?" The police chief says she is investigating the homicide. The dull-witted deputy (he keeps forgetting his gun and likes to go to Arby's for "curly fries) says: "That old guy wasn't anyone." The police chief admonishes him gently: "Everyone is somebody to someone."
The plot in the third season of Fargo amplifies the story of Cain and Abel -- in productions associated with the Coen brothers the book of Genesis is never remote and, indeed, often central to the action. Ewan McGregor plays two brothers, the Stussy's. One of the brothers is a sleazy probation officer in St. Cloud -- he's sleeping with one of his wards and connives a crime with her. The other brother is the so-called "Parking Lot King of Minnesota", a wealthy businessman who lives in an Eden Prairie manor -- my loyal readers will recall that Eden Prairie is my hometown. As in the Bible, the probation officer feels that his successful brother has cheated him of his patrimony. Accordingly, the probation officer blackmails a thug that he is supervising (the man has failed a "piss test" for drugs) into committing a home invasion of his brother's mansion. An ubiquitous theme in Coen brothers' productions is the stupidity of criminals and the criminal enterprise in general -- the Coen brothers often show crime as an outcome of ignorance, laziness, and, general, dim-wittedness and this show is no exception. The thug confuses Eden Prairie with Eden Valley, goes to the wrong place, and burglarizes the home of an elderly alcoholic, also named Stussy. In the course of burglary, the criminal glues shut the nose and mouth of the old man and, of course, he perishes. This is doubly ironic because the old man, although hiding under the pseudonym of Dennis Stussy, in fact, doesn't really have that name -- indeed, we discover that the old man is actually someone called Thaddeus Mobley. The abusive old man was briefly married to the mother of the town's police chief, the heroine in the series. The police chief is played by Carrie Coons and she is a woman of unremitting kindness and unassuming virtue, the moral fulcrum of the story. The police chief investigates the killing, which seems to be wholly senseless, and this leads her in the direction, ultimately, of the successful Stussy brother and his shabby sibling. As it happens, the Parking Lot King has borrowed a million dollars during a down-turn in his business from some shady investors. The investors have now materialized and claim a business stake in the Parking Lot King's enterprises. It's clear that these investors are profoundly evil -- they are represented by a lugubrious and sinister goon played by David Thewelis who seems the embodiment of a kind of ugly cruelty. Thewelis and his henchmen want to use the Stussy parking lot empire for money-laundering. It's clear that female police chief's investigation will suture together the murder plot involving the old man's death in Eden Valley and the plight of the Parking Lot King in Eden Prairie. How this will all work out remains to be seen. Last year's Fargo devolved into a series of idiotic, if brilliantly staged, shootouts and massacres. After one group of sleazy characters were slaughtered, the show would regenerate a whole new cast and, then, butcher them as well. And the whole thing was unduly repetitious, therefore, too long and implausible. So far the third series has remained within reasonable bounds of plausibility and, although many details are grotesque, the plot is interesting and driven by fascinating characters.
Although the merits of the series as a whole remains to be seen, I write in praise of the third episode, a generous interlude in the plot, a symbolic entr'acte and a lapidary, self-contained narrative gem, one of the best things ever broadcast on TV. In this episode, the Eden Valley police chief departs Minnesota and undertakes an investigation in Hollywood. She has discovered a secret trove of documents including novels apparently written by the old drunk under the name Thaddeus Mobley. Among those papers, the police chief has found a picture showing a young man with a Jewish film producer, a man named Bob Zimmerman (a nasty joke about a certain famous singer from Hibbing, Minnesota). The police chief flies to Hollywood and checks into a low-rent motel. By the sort of coincidence that often adorns Coen brothers' films, the police chief stays in Room 203, the same room where the young Thaddeus Mobley lived during the events that we are shown in this episode. The Hollywood sequence begins with a sweeping crane shot of congested freeways that seems to be extracted from LaLa Land and, then, Mobley's story is told in flashback as we follow the police chief's investigation. Thaddeus Mobley as a straight, clean-cut young man has won a prize for best science fiction novel in 1970. At a Scifi convention, he encounters the sleazy Zimmerman. Zimmerman is a fantastic villain, a vicious Jewish con-man played by Fred Melamed. (Melamed is the Coen brothers "go-to" character actor when they need to depict a duplicitous silver-tongued Jew and I never seen him in anything in which he is less than mesmerizing. In Fargo, Melamed is a suave seducer and he speaks in a repugnant dialect comprised of Hollywood argot, Yiddish, and Spanish. The man is deeply evil but also profoundly persuasive and oddly philosophical -- he is a moral nihilist but, at least, a self-conscious one. The way Melamed plays this role you can understand exactly how the young man falls under his spell.) Using the services of a harlot, also indelibly played by Francesca Eastwood, the youthful writer is persuaded to sign away his advances on his new novel and also the royalties on his previous books. He does this to finance a film project that Zimmerman has promoted, an attempt to adapt to the screen the writer's award-winning novel The Planet Wyh. Zimmerman uses both sex and cocaine to entangle the young man in his scheme and defraud him of his money. When the young man goes to his girlfriend's apartment to score some cocaine -- he is now addicted -- he finds Zimmerman present. It becomes obvious to him that Zimmerman and his erstwhile girlfriend have plotted to defraud him. The girl taunts the young writer and there is a fight. Zimmerman strangles the young man and, then, contemptuously hurls him onto the floor. But the youth is resilient. He gets up and beats Zimmerman half to death with the producer's own silver-handled cane. He is about to smash in the girls' face but stays his hand crying out "You are a bad person." Returning to Room 203 at the motel, the young man finds that he is covered in blood. He vomits and, while puking, sees the name "Dennis Stussy & Sons" stenciled into the porcelain rim of the toilet. Thus, we discover how Thaddeaus Mobley who is now packing his bags to escape to rural Minnesota, adopted the fatal name, Dennis Stussy.
The plot is simple enough and squalid, a nasty bit of verismo, but incidental aspects to the story open into a rich Coen brothers hall of mirrors, a system of strange allusions and exotic themes. On the plane to Hollywood, the police chief sits next to weary businessman. This man played by Ray Wise (he was Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) says that he is on his sixth flight of the week. "But it's only Tuesday," the police chief says. "Exactly," the man says. One of the themes central to the Coen brothers is that of the wanderer, the person who has no home -- this is a Jewish theme and most integrally expressed in the concept of the "wandering Jew." In Hollywood, a crook steals the chief's luggage. An LA detective takes a romantic interest in the heroine and, when he recovers her suitcase -- it's empty -- invites her to a bar. The cop turns out to be a smug Don Juan who bluntly propositions her. In the tavern, the heroine encounters the wandering businessman and he tells her a strange story about a woman who was both divorced and married at the same time. This tale implicates a Coen brothers obsession about unstable quantum states, most obviously dramatized in the reference to Schroedinger's Cat in A Serious Man -- the cat in the black box hypothesized by Schroedinger is both dead and alive at the same time. Quantum theory is also referenced in a speech delivered by the dying and feeble Zimmerman in the nursing home where he is now confined. Zimmerman has lost his larynx to cancer and speaks through a mechanical device that imparts to his words an eerie, prophetic timbre. Zimmerman says that all human encounters are merely collisions in which we suddenly become "real" but only for an instance. He remains an awful person and tells the police chief to "not let the door hit (her) as she leaves." Ultimately, the viewer perceives that the story is designed along three axes -- there is the indefatigable wanderer in the name of virtue, the police chief, the profound evil of Zimmerman and his girlfriend, and the hapless naïve virtue of a third strand to the narrative, the parable of the wandering robot MNSKY. MNSKY is a figure in Mobley's award-winning novel, a small, frail robot contrived for the purpose of being helpful. In simply, but effectively animated sequences, we see he robot's space ship crash land on earth where the little machine spends the next 2.7 million years wandering around trying to help people: "I can help!" the little robot chirps to everyone it meets. Of course, human life on earth is pretty much a terrible experiment -- there are ceaseless cruelties and massacres. At one point, some sadists tear off one of the robot's arms. "I can help!' the robot squeaks and, then, continues on his way. Later, space invaders destroy almost all life on earth -- the little robot tries to affix a corpse's hand to his mutilated shoulder. At last, some kindly scientists take possession of the battered robot -- they say that he is the oldest sentient being in the universe, over 2.7 million years, but, of course, it is unclear what the robot knows or can tell anyone. And we have never seen the robot help anyone. The scientists tell the robot to shut himself off and he obligingly opens his cranium where there is green light flashing. The light flashes on a switch that he shuts off, triggering another flash, this time red. It seems that throughout his entire travail, the robot had the power of shutting himself off but didn't exercise this faculty. In her motel room, the police chief has discovered a pair of abandoned men's shoes and an enigmatic box. This box comprises the central metaphor in the episode. The box has a switch on its top. When the switch is flipped, the box opens and a green light flashes. As the green light is flashing, a mechanical hand emerges from the box, reaches over to the switch, and flips it -- this causes the box's interior to momentarily flash red before the box shuts itself. Obviously, this weird self-canceling mechanism, correlates to the suicide feature in the robot -- the switch under his cranium -- and symbolizes the entire "self-canceling" project that has animated Mobley's wretched life: the man has canceled himself out because of his fear that he will be detained for the attack on Zimmerman. The box also seems to symbolize the helplessness of the robot, and the apparent hopelessness of the police chief's quest. MNSKY is both the wandering Jew but also "Minnesota Sky", a reference to the land of sky-blue waters as Minnesota is called, and, therefore, another correlate to the police chief who wants to help others, but is deterred from that objective. Further MNSKY and the police chief are also versions of the wandering and exhausted businessman encountered on the plane. Finally, elements of the plot harken back to the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink. In that movie, Fink is confined in a hellish hotel where he strives, unsuccessfully, to complete a screenplay. Some of the imagery in the episode is redolent of the movie -- particularly shots of long, empty and grim corridors or images of superannuated clerks approaching with enigmatic documents. The self-canceling aspect of the automaton, the box that exist only to shut itself off, also correlates, I think, to the notion of a writer's block, an inability to progress on a text that must be completed according to a certain deadline. These factors are all bound together in a kind of Borgesian meta-narrative -- the story of how Thaddeus Mobley became Dennis Stussy, something that the police chief discovers in the bewitched Room 203, opens into a system of references that encompasses a whole fictional world, indeed, a system of worlds. But, in the end, the episode cancels itself out -- the solution to the mystery, that is, how Mobley became Stussy, isn't significant in itself. It's another fact that has now been disclosed but it's a fact that seems capricious, arbitrary, one that has no real meaning -- the solution to the mystery doesn't lead anywhere at all. This is shown, I think by a brief shot depicting Mobley/Stussy in the box of his casket -- the corpse is lit to seem vaguely greenish like the ray emerging from the head of the robot and the automaton's box.
Near the end of the show, there is an ineffably sad scene. (The elegiac aspect in this episode relates to the sheer destructive passage of time.) The police officer sits in an deserted café interviewing an old waitress, all that remains of the glamor girl who betrayed the young and hopeful Thaddeus Mobley. Here the show's casting is brilliant and moving: the waitress is played by Frances Fisher and the seductress in 1970 is acted by Fisher's daughter, Francesca Eastwood. Of course, the women resemble one another closely and it is a profound image of how people age -- the old woman is recognizably the young vamp. (Francesca Eastwood plays her part with some of the cutting menace of her father, Clint Eastwood -- she has mean whispery gunslinger's voice.) The old waitress says: "He was right -- I'm not a good person." She pauses. "But he wasn't good either." The heroine has nothing to say to this remark and somberly gets up to leave the café. Earlier, the chief's deputy calls her and asks: "What are you doing in Hollywood?" The police chief says she is investigating the homicide. The dull-witted deputy (he keeps forgetting his gun and likes to go to Arby's for "curly fries) says: "That old guy wasn't anyone." The police chief admonishes him gently: "Everyone is somebody to someone."
Monday, May 1, 2017
When We Dead Awaken
In Prague and Vienna, a visitor sometimes sees buildings erected around 1900 adorned with life-size or larger figures sinuously wrapped around thresholds or ascending cornices. The figures are nude maidens and youths and they are sculpted to aspire upward. The young women writhe as if they were drowning -- their hands are like flames that seem to clutch for a surface of water just beyond their grasp. The boys are boneless and their heads are tilted backward in ecstasy, lips slightly open as if to exhale their souls as some kind of fiery and gaseous essence. Both boys and maidens have a mortuary aspect -- their eyes are dead and their smooth, marmoreal faces seem to mark tombs. They are beautiful because they are dead or, perhaps, dead because they are beautiful.
Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken was composed 1899. It is a strenuous production involving many exorbitant proclamations of love, hate, and suffering and the show ends high above one of Norway's misty fjords with a great avalanche that sweeps away the protagonist and his female nemesis. The show has never been popular and it is, perhaps, too rarefied for most theater-goers, an uncanny masque that is more like a Noh play than Ibsen's famous, and, often, lengthy, problem plays addressing social issues. (I hasten to note that even those works, however, often involve spooky elements that are symbolically apt but realistically questionable.) In a few years, Freud would commence his famous work, part of which addresses the perennial question of "what do women really want?" Ibsen pioneered this territory and the female characters that he creates in his later works are literally femme fatale -- we can't tell exactly what they desire or why, but we know their objective: the complete destruction of their male counterparts. Hedda Gabler takes a shot with a gun at one of her ex-boyfriends; the girl in The Master Builder is a Lorelei who entices the hero up onto the steeple of his highest tower from which, of course, he is fated to fall to his death. Irene, the catalyst for the drama in When We Dead Awaken, similarly drags the hero, the great sculptor Rubek to his doom. She bears a grudge against him because Rubek earlier in his life defined her as his artistic muse. Being a muse is not easy work and poorly compensated to boot. Irene posed naked for Rubek's greatest work, a sculptural ensemble called "The Resurrection", but she was never exactly central to his art (or his life) and when he dismissed her after the work was done, characterizing this as an "episode" in his life, she seems to have gone stark, raving mad. She traipses around like a zombie, pale as a cadaver and wearing spooky white cerements. Hidden in her bosom is a little dagger that she says that she has used to slaughter her last husband as well as "dozens of (her) children." Although Rubek's abandonment has driven her insane, she wasn't exactly a model of mental health before he left her -- at one point, she says that while posing naked for Rubek she longed for him to embrace her; in the same breath, she notes that if he had done that she would have pulled a long needle from where it was hidden in her hair and pierced either his heart or his eye. Irene's startling reappearance in Rubek's life is a "return of the repressed," a turning that will both reinvigorate and destroy the great artist.
Clearly, Irene bears the symbolic burden of being Rubek's inspiration, perhaps, even an embodiment for his imagination, a faculty that is now deadened and that has turned numbly toward self-destruction. The other characters are similarly allegorical. Rubek's young wife, Maia, represents the yearning to be free, the desire to be loved, the sexual instinct, and, also, paradoxically the stultifying effects of marriage. Maia and Rubek encounter Ulfheim, an exotic figure like a character in Peer Gynt. Ulfheim is a bear hunter, a vigorous and passionate man of action, and, of course, he incites a great deal of conflicted lust in Rubek's unfortunate spouse. The plot is simple in the extreme. Irene, Rubek's muse, appears as a living corpse at a mountain spa where Maia and Rubek are fruitlessly bickering. Rubek immediately renews his passionate relationship with the mad woman, not aware as even the dullest member of the audience knows, that she is his nemesis and will contrive his death. Rubek's emotional infidelity frees Maia to flirt with Ulfheim, the bear-slayer. The four characters end up on a rocky defile high in the mountains. A storm arises. Ulfheim saves Maia by carrying her down the mountain. Rubek and Irene perish in an avalanche. In this late Romantic mise en scene every element is symbolic. The mountainous landscape, the sound effects of babbling brooks and laughing children, as well as the characters and their heightened discourse all mean something beyond, and additional to, their literal reality. The essential Agon or struggle in the drama, its conflict, is between the aspirations of the characters as actual people, as flesh-and-blood, and the limitations of their symbolic or allegorical roles. For instance, Irene is an embodiment of the muse, a symbol for the dead end of fin-de-siecle esthetics, and, probably, Rubek's artistic imagination -- but she is also meant to be a figure with whom we can identify on a literal flesh-and-blood level. Rubek is a man struggling with his sense that he is allegorical figure for all the aspirations of late Romantic art -- he's like Aschenbach in Mann's roughly contemporaneous Death in Venice, the last representative of a movement that has exhausted itself. Maia both materializes the sexual repression against which Ibsen rages, but, also, is supposed to be a plausible female character. Ulfheim is so wholly symbolic that he seems cartoonish -- he doesn't suffer any conflict because the archetypal dragon-slayer, the man of action and nothing but action never has any second thoughts or regrets about what he does. It is often observed that Ibsen's mature works, beginning with Brand and Peer Gynt, start out in the open air of Norway's fjords and glaciers. The rest of the dramas take place in closed domestic spaces and, indeed, are claustrophobic -- the "wild duck", for instance, in the play of that name, spends its whole life in an attic. But in his last play, Ibsen again tears down the walls and stages the climax of the work in the mountains. It is a mistake to see When We Dead Awaken, however, as a reversion to the nature- romanticism of Peer Gynt. Rather, the mountains and avalanche at the end of this last play represent a landscape that is wholly spiritualized, that is, a landscape that is entirely internal, a proto-expressionistic landscape that has dissolved into a representation of various states of the soul.
I saw this show at the Commonweal Theater on April 31, 2017. The production was simple but effective. The mountain landscape was represented by a backdrop of brown goblin-shaped forms, painted to look like a malign pastry or Badlands hoodoos or giant trolls. (I thought the shape of the mountains echoed the famous image of the vast and hairy troll shadowing Ibsen as he strolled down Oslo's Karl Johann's Gate for his lunch and midday beer at the Grand Café.) A few irregular blocks represented cliffs and gorges and an elongated banner of glittery-looking blue fabric played the part of a rippling stream. Hal Cropp was a suitably world-weary, cynical, and, yet ultimately passionate Rubek -- he successfully and vividly navigated Rubek's long discourses on the tribulations of the artist, and, further, made plausible the hero's gradual awakening from the torpor induced by his exhaustion and unhappy marriage to his doomed ecstasy among the peaks. Elizabeth Dunn was effectively girlish as Maia and Eric Lee dashed about with bravado as the swashbuckling Ulfheim -- he courts Rubek's wife by waving a bloody steak before her eyes and, then, cries out that his ravenous hounds "love to be teased." Adrienne Sweeney was sepulchral as the cadaverous femme fatale, Irene. She embodied the sort of hysterical neediness that has been both a snare and pitfall for men since the dawn of time. The climax reminded me a bit of productions of Turandot that I have seen, another late flowering of the Romantic movement. As the mountain makes thunderous sounds, Rubek and Irene shout out scarcely articulate cries of passion, slogans and mottos more than speeches. Then, it is dark and there is a terrible roaring sound and, when the lights brighten, we see a vast and silent field of snow under which the lovers are entombed. (I could have done without the overly explicit use of a transparency to show the lover's apotheosis within a cell in the mountains, a kind of honeyed shower-stall where Rubek and Irene are discovered in an embrace -- this was too Wagnerian for my taste and problematic thematically although de gustibus non disputandum...) When We Dead Awaken, of course, is both a lavish example of symbolic and decadent late Romanticism and a thoroughgoing criticism of the excesses of that movement. The glacial field of ice and snow that buries Rubek and Irene is the marble monument to a style of art and sensibility that has died and been buried with all due obsequies in Ibsen's last work for the theater.
This is a fascinating show, thrilling at times, and deserves to be seen by as large an audience as possible.
Ibsen's last play, When We Dead Awaken was composed 1899. It is a strenuous production involving many exorbitant proclamations of love, hate, and suffering and the show ends high above one of Norway's misty fjords with a great avalanche that sweeps away the protagonist and his female nemesis. The show has never been popular and it is, perhaps, too rarefied for most theater-goers, an uncanny masque that is more like a Noh play than Ibsen's famous, and, often, lengthy, problem plays addressing social issues. (I hasten to note that even those works, however, often involve spooky elements that are symbolically apt but realistically questionable.) In a few years, Freud would commence his famous work, part of which addresses the perennial question of "what do women really want?" Ibsen pioneered this territory and the female characters that he creates in his later works are literally femme fatale -- we can't tell exactly what they desire or why, but we know their objective: the complete destruction of their male counterparts. Hedda Gabler takes a shot with a gun at one of her ex-boyfriends; the girl in The Master Builder is a Lorelei who entices the hero up onto the steeple of his highest tower from which, of course, he is fated to fall to his death. Irene, the catalyst for the drama in When We Dead Awaken, similarly drags the hero, the great sculptor Rubek to his doom. She bears a grudge against him because Rubek earlier in his life defined her as his artistic muse. Being a muse is not easy work and poorly compensated to boot. Irene posed naked for Rubek's greatest work, a sculptural ensemble called "The Resurrection", but she was never exactly central to his art (or his life) and when he dismissed her after the work was done, characterizing this as an "episode" in his life, she seems to have gone stark, raving mad. She traipses around like a zombie, pale as a cadaver and wearing spooky white cerements. Hidden in her bosom is a little dagger that she says that she has used to slaughter her last husband as well as "dozens of (her) children." Although Rubek's abandonment has driven her insane, she wasn't exactly a model of mental health before he left her -- at one point, she says that while posing naked for Rubek she longed for him to embrace her; in the same breath, she notes that if he had done that she would have pulled a long needle from where it was hidden in her hair and pierced either his heart or his eye. Irene's startling reappearance in Rubek's life is a "return of the repressed," a turning that will both reinvigorate and destroy the great artist.
Clearly, Irene bears the symbolic burden of being Rubek's inspiration, perhaps, even an embodiment for his imagination, a faculty that is now deadened and that has turned numbly toward self-destruction. The other characters are similarly allegorical. Rubek's young wife, Maia, represents the yearning to be free, the desire to be loved, the sexual instinct, and, also, paradoxically the stultifying effects of marriage. Maia and Rubek encounter Ulfheim, an exotic figure like a character in Peer Gynt. Ulfheim is a bear hunter, a vigorous and passionate man of action, and, of course, he incites a great deal of conflicted lust in Rubek's unfortunate spouse. The plot is simple in the extreme. Irene, Rubek's muse, appears as a living corpse at a mountain spa where Maia and Rubek are fruitlessly bickering. Rubek immediately renews his passionate relationship with the mad woman, not aware as even the dullest member of the audience knows, that she is his nemesis and will contrive his death. Rubek's emotional infidelity frees Maia to flirt with Ulfheim, the bear-slayer. The four characters end up on a rocky defile high in the mountains. A storm arises. Ulfheim saves Maia by carrying her down the mountain. Rubek and Irene perish in an avalanche. In this late Romantic mise en scene every element is symbolic. The mountainous landscape, the sound effects of babbling brooks and laughing children, as well as the characters and their heightened discourse all mean something beyond, and additional to, their literal reality. The essential Agon or struggle in the drama, its conflict, is between the aspirations of the characters as actual people, as flesh-and-blood, and the limitations of their symbolic or allegorical roles. For instance, Irene is an embodiment of the muse, a symbol for the dead end of fin-de-siecle esthetics, and, probably, Rubek's artistic imagination -- but she is also meant to be a figure with whom we can identify on a literal flesh-and-blood level. Rubek is a man struggling with his sense that he is allegorical figure for all the aspirations of late Romantic art -- he's like Aschenbach in Mann's roughly contemporaneous Death in Venice, the last representative of a movement that has exhausted itself. Maia both materializes the sexual repression against which Ibsen rages, but, also, is supposed to be a plausible female character. Ulfheim is so wholly symbolic that he seems cartoonish -- he doesn't suffer any conflict because the archetypal dragon-slayer, the man of action and nothing but action never has any second thoughts or regrets about what he does. It is often observed that Ibsen's mature works, beginning with Brand and Peer Gynt, start out in the open air of Norway's fjords and glaciers. The rest of the dramas take place in closed domestic spaces and, indeed, are claustrophobic -- the "wild duck", for instance, in the play of that name, spends its whole life in an attic. But in his last play, Ibsen again tears down the walls and stages the climax of the work in the mountains. It is a mistake to see When We Dead Awaken, however, as a reversion to the nature- romanticism of Peer Gynt. Rather, the mountains and avalanche at the end of this last play represent a landscape that is wholly spiritualized, that is, a landscape that is entirely internal, a proto-expressionistic landscape that has dissolved into a representation of various states of the soul.
I saw this show at the Commonweal Theater on April 31, 2017. The production was simple but effective. The mountain landscape was represented by a backdrop of brown goblin-shaped forms, painted to look like a malign pastry or Badlands hoodoos or giant trolls. (I thought the shape of the mountains echoed the famous image of the vast and hairy troll shadowing Ibsen as he strolled down Oslo's Karl Johann's Gate for his lunch and midday beer at the Grand Café.) A few irregular blocks represented cliffs and gorges and an elongated banner of glittery-looking blue fabric played the part of a rippling stream. Hal Cropp was a suitably world-weary, cynical, and, yet ultimately passionate Rubek -- he successfully and vividly navigated Rubek's long discourses on the tribulations of the artist, and, further, made plausible the hero's gradual awakening from the torpor induced by his exhaustion and unhappy marriage to his doomed ecstasy among the peaks. Elizabeth Dunn was effectively girlish as Maia and Eric Lee dashed about with bravado as the swashbuckling Ulfheim -- he courts Rubek's wife by waving a bloody steak before her eyes and, then, cries out that his ravenous hounds "love to be teased." Adrienne Sweeney was sepulchral as the cadaverous femme fatale, Irene. She embodied the sort of hysterical neediness that has been both a snare and pitfall for men since the dawn of time. The climax reminded me a bit of productions of Turandot that I have seen, another late flowering of the Romantic movement. As the mountain makes thunderous sounds, Rubek and Irene shout out scarcely articulate cries of passion, slogans and mottos more than speeches. Then, it is dark and there is a terrible roaring sound and, when the lights brighten, we see a vast and silent field of snow under which the lovers are entombed. (I could have done without the overly explicit use of a transparency to show the lover's apotheosis within a cell in the mountains, a kind of honeyed shower-stall where Rubek and Irene are discovered in an embrace -- this was too Wagnerian for my taste and problematic thematically although de gustibus non disputandum...) When We Dead Awaken, of course, is both a lavish example of symbolic and decadent late Romanticism and a thoroughgoing criticism of the excesses of that movement. The glacial field of ice and snow that buries Rubek and Irene is the marble monument to a style of art and sensibility that has died and been buried with all due obsequies in Ibsen's last work for the theater.
This is a fascinating show, thrilling at times, and deserves to be seen by as large an audience as possible.
Friday, April 28, 2017
Toni Erdmann
Maren Ade's 2016 film, Toni Erdmann is like an iceberg -- two-thirds of the essential narrative is submerged and, therefore, invisible to the eye. I have a sense that the director became enamored with the title character, a person who really doesn't exist even within the frame of the film, and may have lost control of certain aspects of the plot -- it's like Falstaff seizing Shakespeare's imagination in the history plays involving Henry V. The movie is very long, 165 minutes, and, yet, it feels strangely foreshortened, abbreviated in some ways, with essential integument excised. The version that premiered in German cinemas last year is probably edited down from an initial cut that was much longer. Even so, there is a novelistic density of detail and an encyclopedic scope of reference in the 165 minute film that is remarkable. To understand what seems to have been omitted, of course, it's necessary for me to summarize briefly what Ade shows us.
Winfried Conradi is a retired music teacher, probably in his early seventies. He apparently lives in Aachen with his old and sick dog. Conradi's daughter, Ines, is a successful executive with a multi-national oil corporation. She is single, fantastically hardworking, and estranged from her father -- this estrangement is not dramatic; there is no trauma that has created the distance between daughter and father. Like the busy younger generation in Ozu's Tokyo Story (a film that Toni Erdmann resembles slightly), Ines is simply too busy to take time for her father. Furthermore, on first blush, her analytical, no-nonsense personality clashes violently with her father's zany and wildly extroverted, even confrontational, self-presentation. In fact, and I am indebted to a critic on Roger Ebert's blog for this notion, the acorn has not fallen too far from the tree and Ines turns out to be just aggressively weird and nonconformist as her father. During a strained visit to Aachen, Conradi senses that Ines is unhappy. They part on bad terms when he asks her invasive questions about how she perceives the meaning of her life. When his dog dies, Conradi, goes to Bucharest where Ines is pursuing a contract as a consultant to a Rumanian oil company. Wearing an unruly "fright" wig and decked-out with protruding "buck" teeth, a sort of Spencer's Gifts gag outfit, Conradi harasses Ines at work, inserting himself into her professional activities. At various times, he pretends to be Toni Erdmann, a wealthy German émigré and Ines' "life coach"; on other occasions, he acts as an imposter, claiming that he is the German ambassador to Rumania. Conradi haunts his daughter's business meetings and attends various business-related parties with her -- there is lot of lavish business-entertaining in this film, some of it involving cocaine. At several gatherings, Conradi playing the role of Erdman says that his daughter is distant and preoccupied by work and that he has had to hire another young woman to impersonate his daughter. ("She cuts my toenails," Erdmann proudly proclaims and he suggests renting family members to wealthy Germans might be a good industry for the impoverished Rumanians to pursue.) These antics lead to a series of increasingly explosive encounters with his daughter. Ultimately, Ines, driven to distraction, begins to act erratically herself. After belting out a Whitney Houston tune at a family party that Erdmann and she have crashed, Ines greets guests at her birthday brunch the next day stark naked. She claims that the nudity is a "team-building" exercise. After the disastrous nude brunch, Ines quits her job with the multi-national company exploiting the Rumanian oil fields for work with another big corporation with offices in Singapore. At the funeral of her grandmother, Ines sees her father once more. His father expresses his hopes that she will make the best of her life and be happy. She briefly dons his gag false teeth and wears a bucolic-looking straw hat. But it's a momentary rapprochement and the film ends with a long shot of Ines standing alone in the back yard of someone's home in Aachen. Nothing much has changed and she intends to be in Singapore for the next two years.
This outline doesn't hint at the complexity of the film and its novelistic dimensions. Among other things, the film addresses very intelligently issues such as European feminism and the "glass ceiling," the Rumanian oil industry and poverty in that nation, infighting among close colleagues in business, painting Easter eggs in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and problems caused by the EU and the increasing globalization of multi-national corporations. In particular, about a third of the film is devoted to Ines' intricate scheming with respect to the business enterprises that she serves -- an important aspect of the film is its demonstration (by showing not telling) that Ines is much more competent, ruthless, and brilliant than any of her male counterparts, (although she has a man for a boss) and that she is as aggressive in her world as her father is within his sphere. (We see Conradi in Aachen leading a choir dressed and made-up as zombies singing a song about death to High School students; when he loses his last piano student, he mournfully says: "But I bought the piano just for you" before admitting this is "just a joke" and, when an Amazon package is delivered to his house, he calls for his brother, says the man is a mail-bomber, and, then in costume as Toni Erdmann, terrorizes the postal delivery worker. During most of the Aachen scenes, Conradi wears stark white zombie make-up and has a smear of blood painted around his lips.) There is so much in the film that it is surprising that, in some ways, we know so little about the characters. Conradi and Ines have no back-story; we don't know anything about Ines' mother or what her relationship was like with the eccentric Winfried; I'm guessing the funeral at the film's end involves Ines' grandmother and Conradi's mother but this is never clearly established. We don't really know anything about Conradi's relationship with Ines before the movie begins. Conradi has an uncanny capability of tracking Ines and appearing wherever she goes -- how does he do that? A very important scene involves Ines and Erdmann at an Easter party -- I wasn't able to figure out how Erdmann got the invitation to the party and how he managed to find the place. From time to time, you have the feeling that expository information has ended up on the cutting room floor. Ade uses no establishing shots -- this leads to momentary confusion: are we in Aachen or Bucharest? Conradi's appearances disrupting Ines' business and personal affairs seem increasingly uncanny. The unheimlich aspect of these interventions is signified by Conradi's make-up as a zombie at the film's beginning and his appearance in the vast and furry body of a Bulgarian kukeri at Ines' naked brunch. In contrast with the other guests, who are either completely, or almost, nude, Conradi rings the doorbell covered from head to foot in a costume simulating bear fur. He wears a massive globular head-piece from which protrudes a staff decorated with bells and tassels. (Kukeri are costumed mummers whose appearance is apotropaic -- they are supposed to ward off evil spirits; their role in folk traditions in the Balkans dates back to Greek times -- it is surmised that they may be representations of Dionysius.) In an alarming sequence, Conradi can't get the Kukeri helmet off his head and the audience fears that he will suffocate in the hot costume -- it seems to be a warm day and everyone else is lightly dressed.) In his Kukeri costume, Conradi seems more approachable and the irritable Ines actually embraces him when he is dressed as a monster.
Toni Erdmann belongs to an old and honorable genre of films -- the mismatched buddy or "odd couple" movie. Initially, the film works with energy generated from the contrast between the apparently laid-back, comical, and mischievous father and his tight-laced, highly disciplined daughter. But the film is unhurried and its length allows Ade to demonstrate that father and daughter are not that different in their aggressive approach to the world. As described, the movie seems slightly sentimental, the wacky antics of the old pensioner played for laughs. But this would be a misperception of the film: Winfried Conradi's harassment of his daughter is maniacal and obsessive, even, as I have previously observed, uncanny. There is a distinct sadistic edge to his impersonations and much of what he does seems to be directed toward humiliating and shaming Ines. If he is acting from love, it is an odd Teutonic sort of love. Indeed, in his manic impersonations, Winfried Conradi seems just as single-minded and disciplined as his daughter. What's more, he doesn't seem to be having that much fun -- Conradi is the kind of deadpan joker who says the most outrageous things without providing any evidence that he is joking. We rarely see him smile except with the prosthetic teeth protruding from his lips. Ines is equally confrontational and perverse -- we discover this in her peculiar approach to sex. She has a boyfriend among her colleagues, a little vain fellow, who fancies himself a great ladies' man. Ines makes him masturbate for her amusement, demanding that he ejaculate on a room service petites four with the promise that she will eat the semen-soaked comestible once he has finished. And she goes far beyond any of her father's antics in orchestrating the naked brunch, a stunt that she engineers out of annoyance that the zippers on her tight clothing are inaccessible. (The stunt is also intended to draw attention to the pervasive sexual harassment in the workplace -- by appearing stark naked at the brunch, she draws attention to, and defuses, the sexual undertones in the consulting firm: in this milieu, women are supposed to dress seductively and be available for flirtations with the customers -- so why not just appear naked?) There is another sinister element in Ines' conduct -- she's just as nasty, or, even, nastier than the men (when she gets blood on her blouse, she makes her adoring assistant change blouses with her). But she doesn't seem to get much joy out of coldly dominating others -- for much of the film, she seems profoundly depressed, taking refuge in long naps; Ines literally sleeps through much of the movie.
Toni Erdmann is full of small telling details. For instance, when Winfried's dog dies, the sick animal, too weak to go inside the house, apparently crawls off to die under a bush. Winfried is keeping a vigil next to the sick dog and has fallen asleep. When he awakes the dog is missing and he finds the body a few yards away under the shrubbery. I have personally seen dogs act in this way and the film is packed with verismo -- realistic details of this kind. But, at its essence, Toni Erdmann is a kind of half-crazed fairy tale, a film that features the appearance of a furry monster at its climax. The actors playing Ines and Winfried are on the screen either together or alternatively in every shot in the film and their performances are memorable and could not be bettered. Although its a long film, Toni Erdmann is never less than compelling and boasts several scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny. It's one of the best pictures of the year. (Hollywood has its claws in this film: we understand a remake is under way -- Robin Williams would have been ideal in the part of the old man; perhaps, Louis C. K. can play the role.)
Winfried Conradi is a retired music teacher, probably in his early seventies. He apparently lives in Aachen with his old and sick dog. Conradi's daughter, Ines, is a successful executive with a multi-national oil corporation. She is single, fantastically hardworking, and estranged from her father -- this estrangement is not dramatic; there is no trauma that has created the distance between daughter and father. Like the busy younger generation in Ozu's Tokyo Story (a film that Toni Erdmann resembles slightly), Ines is simply too busy to take time for her father. Furthermore, on first blush, her analytical, no-nonsense personality clashes violently with her father's zany and wildly extroverted, even confrontational, self-presentation. In fact, and I am indebted to a critic on Roger Ebert's blog for this notion, the acorn has not fallen too far from the tree and Ines turns out to be just aggressively weird and nonconformist as her father. During a strained visit to Aachen, Conradi senses that Ines is unhappy. They part on bad terms when he asks her invasive questions about how she perceives the meaning of her life. When his dog dies, Conradi, goes to Bucharest where Ines is pursuing a contract as a consultant to a Rumanian oil company. Wearing an unruly "fright" wig and decked-out with protruding "buck" teeth, a sort of Spencer's Gifts gag outfit, Conradi harasses Ines at work, inserting himself into her professional activities. At various times, he pretends to be Toni Erdmann, a wealthy German émigré and Ines' "life coach"; on other occasions, he acts as an imposter, claiming that he is the German ambassador to Rumania. Conradi haunts his daughter's business meetings and attends various business-related parties with her -- there is lot of lavish business-entertaining in this film, some of it involving cocaine. At several gatherings, Conradi playing the role of Erdman says that his daughter is distant and preoccupied by work and that he has had to hire another young woman to impersonate his daughter. ("She cuts my toenails," Erdmann proudly proclaims and he suggests renting family members to wealthy Germans might be a good industry for the impoverished Rumanians to pursue.) These antics lead to a series of increasingly explosive encounters with his daughter. Ultimately, Ines, driven to distraction, begins to act erratically herself. After belting out a Whitney Houston tune at a family party that Erdmann and she have crashed, Ines greets guests at her birthday brunch the next day stark naked. She claims that the nudity is a "team-building" exercise. After the disastrous nude brunch, Ines quits her job with the multi-national company exploiting the Rumanian oil fields for work with another big corporation with offices in Singapore. At the funeral of her grandmother, Ines sees her father once more. His father expresses his hopes that she will make the best of her life and be happy. She briefly dons his gag false teeth and wears a bucolic-looking straw hat. But it's a momentary rapprochement and the film ends with a long shot of Ines standing alone in the back yard of someone's home in Aachen. Nothing much has changed and she intends to be in Singapore for the next two years.
This outline doesn't hint at the complexity of the film and its novelistic dimensions. Among other things, the film addresses very intelligently issues such as European feminism and the "glass ceiling," the Rumanian oil industry and poverty in that nation, infighting among close colleagues in business, painting Easter eggs in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and problems caused by the EU and the increasing globalization of multi-national corporations. In particular, about a third of the film is devoted to Ines' intricate scheming with respect to the business enterprises that she serves -- an important aspect of the film is its demonstration (by showing not telling) that Ines is much more competent, ruthless, and brilliant than any of her male counterparts, (although she has a man for a boss) and that she is as aggressive in her world as her father is within his sphere. (We see Conradi in Aachen leading a choir dressed and made-up as zombies singing a song about death to High School students; when he loses his last piano student, he mournfully says: "But I bought the piano just for you" before admitting this is "just a joke" and, when an Amazon package is delivered to his house, he calls for his brother, says the man is a mail-bomber, and, then in costume as Toni Erdmann, terrorizes the postal delivery worker. During most of the Aachen scenes, Conradi wears stark white zombie make-up and has a smear of blood painted around his lips.) There is so much in the film that it is surprising that, in some ways, we know so little about the characters. Conradi and Ines have no back-story; we don't know anything about Ines' mother or what her relationship was like with the eccentric Winfried; I'm guessing the funeral at the film's end involves Ines' grandmother and Conradi's mother but this is never clearly established. We don't really know anything about Conradi's relationship with Ines before the movie begins. Conradi has an uncanny capability of tracking Ines and appearing wherever she goes -- how does he do that? A very important scene involves Ines and Erdmann at an Easter party -- I wasn't able to figure out how Erdmann got the invitation to the party and how he managed to find the place. From time to time, you have the feeling that expository information has ended up on the cutting room floor. Ade uses no establishing shots -- this leads to momentary confusion: are we in Aachen or Bucharest? Conradi's appearances disrupting Ines' business and personal affairs seem increasingly uncanny. The unheimlich aspect of these interventions is signified by Conradi's make-up as a zombie at the film's beginning and his appearance in the vast and furry body of a Bulgarian kukeri at Ines' naked brunch. In contrast with the other guests, who are either completely, or almost, nude, Conradi rings the doorbell covered from head to foot in a costume simulating bear fur. He wears a massive globular head-piece from which protrudes a staff decorated with bells and tassels. (Kukeri are costumed mummers whose appearance is apotropaic -- they are supposed to ward off evil spirits; their role in folk traditions in the Balkans dates back to Greek times -- it is surmised that they may be representations of Dionysius.) In an alarming sequence, Conradi can't get the Kukeri helmet off his head and the audience fears that he will suffocate in the hot costume -- it seems to be a warm day and everyone else is lightly dressed.) In his Kukeri costume, Conradi seems more approachable and the irritable Ines actually embraces him when he is dressed as a monster.
Toni Erdmann belongs to an old and honorable genre of films -- the mismatched buddy or "odd couple" movie. Initially, the film works with energy generated from the contrast between the apparently laid-back, comical, and mischievous father and his tight-laced, highly disciplined daughter. But the film is unhurried and its length allows Ade to demonstrate that father and daughter are not that different in their aggressive approach to the world. As described, the movie seems slightly sentimental, the wacky antics of the old pensioner played for laughs. But this would be a misperception of the film: Winfried Conradi's harassment of his daughter is maniacal and obsessive, even, as I have previously observed, uncanny. There is a distinct sadistic edge to his impersonations and much of what he does seems to be directed toward humiliating and shaming Ines. If he is acting from love, it is an odd Teutonic sort of love. Indeed, in his manic impersonations, Winfried Conradi seems just as single-minded and disciplined as his daughter. What's more, he doesn't seem to be having that much fun -- Conradi is the kind of deadpan joker who says the most outrageous things without providing any evidence that he is joking. We rarely see him smile except with the prosthetic teeth protruding from his lips. Ines is equally confrontational and perverse -- we discover this in her peculiar approach to sex. She has a boyfriend among her colleagues, a little vain fellow, who fancies himself a great ladies' man. Ines makes him masturbate for her amusement, demanding that he ejaculate on a room service petites four with the promise that she will eat the semen-soaked comestible once he has finished. And she goes far beyond any of her father's antics in orchestrating the naked brunch, a stunt that she engineers out of annoyance that the zippers on her tight clothing are inaccessible. (The stunt is also intended to draw attention to the pervasive sexual harassment in the workplace -- by appearing stark naked at the brunch, she draws attention to, and defuses, the sexual undertones in the consulting firm: in this milieu, women are supposed to dress seductively and be available for flirtations with the customers -- so why not just appear naked?) There is another sinister element in Ines' conduct -- she's just as nasty, or, even, nastier than the men (when she gets blood on her blouse, she makes her adoring assistant change blouses with her). But she doesn't seem to get much joy out of coldly dominating others -- for much of the film, she seems profoundly depressed, taking refuge in long naps; Ines literally sleeps through much of the movie.
Toni Erdmann is full of small telling details. For instance, when Winfried's dog dies, the sick animal, too weak to go inside the house, apparently crawls off to die under a bush. Winfried is keeping a vigil next to the sick dog and has fallen asleep. When he awakes the dog is missing and he finds the body a few yards away under the shrubbery. I have personally seen dogs act in this way and the film is packed with verismo -- realistic details of this kind. But, at its essence, Toni Erdmann is a kind of half-crazed fairy tale, a film that features the appearance of a furry monster at its climax. The actors playing Ines and Winfried are on the screen either together or alternatively in every shot in the film and their performances are memorable and could not be bettered. Although its a long film, Toni Erdmann is never less than compelling and boasts several scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny. It's one of the best pictures of the year. (Hollywood has its claws in this film: we understand a remake is under way -- Robin Williams would have been ideal in the part of the old man; perhaps, Louis C. K. can play the role.)
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Austerlitz
The best documentaries have two characteristics: first, they reveal their subjects in an unexpected and surprising light, and, second, they challenge the viewer to form his or her own opinions about the material presented. A documentary that tells me only what I already know (or think I know) about its topic fails -- if the movie only shows what I could have surmised on my own, then, the film is superfluous. Similarly, if a documentary is designed to persuade me to a particular point of view and guides me so brutally that I have no recourse but to accept the film's premises and conclusions, then, the movie is a species of propaganda. As Leni Riefenstahl and Roger Moore have shown us, propaganda can be art -- but it is a debased form of art, more closely related to advertising than anything else. By these criterion, Sergei Loznitsa's 90 minute documentary Austerlitz is a stunning success. Unfortunately, the movie's praxis is so rigorous and austerely scientific that the film will have most audiences running for the exits. This fact, alone, is thought-provoking and deserves careful consideration.
Loznitsa's film consists of approximately 40 shots -- I counted them and reached a total of 32 separate camera placements with the four final shots utilizing a single set-up and, thereby, creating a montage of rather inconspicuous jump-cuts. (I count forty images, because I probably missed several). The film is shot in austere, but beautiful black and white. In some instances, the camera uses very deep focus to flatten the image, creating a frieze-like effect -- people moving toward the camera seem not to advance, but rather walk in place. Some camera set-ups exploit multiple planes of focus -- people in the foreground are blurred while those in the deep and middle distance are in tight focus. Several striking shots use windows as mirrors - we see people both inside and exterior to buildings; the people inside the building look out through glass on which we see reflected the crowds outside. In one startling shot, people approaching from the right are first glimpsed in the pane of a half-open door where they seem to be somehow magnified. Loznitsa's camera placements involving panes of translucent glass sometimes look like similar effects achieved in Tarkovsky films. In several shots, objects in the background seem to loom close to the people inspecting them -- for instance, one image of two ominous side-by-side ovens is framed by the telephoto lens to make the crematorium seem very close, indeed, looming over the spectators. Each shot lasts from 90 seconds to three minutes. The camera does not move. Only in the last 30 seconds of the film does anyone explicitly acknowledge the presence of the camera recording the crowds of people touring the historical site -- at the very end of the movie, a girl casually waves to Loznitsa''s camera. The film's sound-recording is similarly complex -- we hear natural sounds (birds, the wind in trees, something that sounds like the hardware on a flag clicking against a flag pole); after about 20 minutes, the sound is recorded so that we can hear what people are saying -- it is a Babel of voices, often with several layers one atop the other: in one sequence, subtitles tell us what a Spanish tour guide is saying while we hear an English or Australian tour guide speaking simultaneously. We are naturally drawn to listen to the English commentary while trying to read the subtitles that are about something completely different -- this is disorienting and difficult for the viewer to do. The crowds shown in the images ebb and flow -- sometimes, we see dozens of people crowded together in the frame. But these crowds also disperse and there are privileged moments when we see one or two people alone in the frame -- everyone else has wondered off. The alternating congestion in the images and their kenosis or emptying out gives the film an odd rhythm.
The subject of the film is Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, or more accurately, the tourists visiting the camp. The film was made on a very hot day in the summer and the light seems to be blinding. Many of the visitors wear scanty shorts and tee-shirts, often bearing disorienting slogans in English. The big parade-grounds are blinding and people walk under parasols to keep the sun off their heads. A lot of the tourists carry bottles of water and drink occasionally. About half of them have audio guides that they hold to their ears. Some take photographs with their cameras or selflie-sticks. (In one scene, an attractive woman poses with her arms casually stretched to both sides directly in front of the gaping black sockets of the crematorium ovens.) The film begins with a shot of trees moving in the breeze and, behind them, tired tourists sitting on a bench. Then, there are several shots of the gateway to the camp both from within the fence and outside -- in handsome Bauhaus letters, the gate displays the motto Arbeit macht frei. The next 30 shots take place at various locations in the camp. This sequence ends with a long shot, empty of people, of the ovens. The final four shots are jump-cuts showing the crowds of people exiting the camp, most of them smiling and looking happy. The last shot shows a large group of people wearing white tee-shirts that read "Travel for Peace" with an image of the globe and a dove. A girl associated with this group waves merrily to the camera. (Several people inside the camp seem to have observed the camera but appear to be intimidated by it -- they look and we see concern registered in their eyes but they don't gesture at Loznitza's photographer.) Often we see people looking with grave concern at something off-camera, presumably a plaque or some kind of photographic exhibit. The film is not about what the tourists see and so we are never shown the historical exhibits or written plaques in the camp. The objective of the film is to show us the tourists, not the camp and, so, with few exceptions, we can't figure out exactly where the visitors are located or what exactly they are seeing. An exception is near the ovens where so-called Sonderkommando extracted the dead from the gas chambers and fed them into the crematoria. There is a huge grim statute in that area, a kind of all-male Pieta of emaciated prisoners carrying a dead man on a spread cloth -- it looks something like certain Baroque and renaissance images of Christ's deposition from the cross. Most of the tourists wear white because of the heat and we see them rendered by the telephoto lens appearing like blithe drifting clouds in front of the huge, grotesque statues -- this shot has a very great formal beauty.
So what are we to make of this film. Loznitza provides no voice-over and no overt commentary. The deck is loaded against the poor tourists: it's a hot day and to say that they are casually dressed is an understatement and, of course, they guzzle water and, sometimes, even surreptitiously eat food that they have smuggled into the site. The camp seems huge and it's pretty clear that many of these people are tired, probably a bit numb from walking long distances. The film would have a very different look if it were shot in bad weather with the tourists wearing coats and parkas or if it were snowing. The tourists generally seem indifferent to what they are seeing -- but this is no different than what I have seen in crowds of tourists dutifully trudging through the Louvre or Versailles or the Metropolitan Museum. We have all experienced the notion that some places are "just too much" -- they are too big and overwhelming and, after a while, you just want to tick-off the highlights and get to a decent restaurant. Most probably, Loznitza's film documents a certain deficiency in the imagination, a defect that is probably necessary if we are to lead reasonably successful lives. It is not easy to imagine the suffering of another; something in our constitution, our fundamental make-up debars such imagination. If the people in the film were to truly imagine what was done to the inmates of this camp, they would faint or collapse in helpless sorrow or go mad. (And it's not just a failure in the imagination of the tourists -- if the testimony of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl is believed, most of the inmates in these camps couldn't quite imagine what was happening either and those who survived seem to have endured often because they couldn't, or wouldn't, comprehend what was happening around them.) I have often said this: if one were sufficiently imaginative to truly grasp with empathy the human suffering occurring in any one square mile of a city, that person would go mad. And, so, I can't exactly fault the tourists who are put to the test by Loznitza's lens and seem to fail by the rigorous standards that the film implies.
Loznitsa's film consists of approximately 40 shots -- I counted them and reached a total of 32 separate camera placements with the four final shots utilizing a single set-up and, thereby, creating a montage of rather inconspicuous jump-cuts. (I count forty images, because I probably missed several). The film is shot in austere, but beautiful black and white. In some instances, the camera uses very deep focus to flatten the image, creating a frieze-like effect -- people moving toward the camera seem not to advance, but rather walk in place. Some camera set-ups exploit multiple planes of focus -- people in the foreground are blurred while those in the deep and middle distance are in tight focus. Several striking shots use windows as mirrors - we see people both inside and exterior to buildings; the people inside the building look out through glass on which we see reflected the crowds outside. In one startling shot, people approaching from the right are first glimpsed in the pane of a half-open door where they seem to be somehow magnified. Loznitsa's camera placements involving panes of translucent glass sometimes look like similar effects achieved in Tarkovsky films. In several shots, objects in the background seem to loom close to the people inspecting them -- for instance, one image of two ominous side-by-side ovens is framed by the telephoto lens to make the crematorium seem very close, indeed, looming over the spectators. Each shot lasts from 90 seconds to three minutes. The camera does not move. Only in the last 30 seconds of the film does anyone explicitly acknowledge the presence of the camera recording the crowds of people touring the historical site -- at the very end of the movie, a girl casually waves to Loznitsa''s camera. The film's sound-recording is similarly complex -- we hear natural sounds (birds, the wind in trees, something that sounds like the hardware on a flag clicking against a flag pole); after about 20 minutes, the sound is recorded so that we can hear what people are saying -- it is a Babel of voices, often with several layers one atop the other: in one sequence, subtitles tell us what a Spanish tour guide is saying while we hear an English or Australian tour guide speaking simultaneously. We are naturally drawn to listen to the English commentary while trying to read the subtitles that are about something completely different -- this is disorienting and difficult for the viewer to do. The crowds shown in the images ebb and flow -- sometimes, we see dozens of people crowded together in the frame. But these crowds also disperse and there are privileged moments when we see one or two people alone in the frame -- everyone else has wondered off. The alternating congestion in the images and their kenosis or emptying out gives the film an odd rhythm.
The subject of the film is Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, or more accurately, the tourists visiting the camp. The film was made on a very hot day in the summer and the light seems to be blinding. Many of the visitors wear scanty shorts and tee-shirts, often bearing disorienting slogans in English. The big parade-grounds are blinding and people walk under parasols to keep the sun off their heads. A lot of the tourists carry bottles of water and drink occasionally. About half of them have audio guides that they hold to their ears. Some take photographs with their cameras or selflie-sticks. (In one scene, an attractive woman poses with her arms casually stretched to both sides directly in front of the gaping black sockets of the crematorium ovens.) The film begins with a shot of trees moving in the breeze and, behind them, tired tourists sitting on a bench. Then, there are several shots of the gateway to the camp both from within the fence and outside -- in handsome Bauhaus letters, the gate displays the motto Arbeit macht frei. The next 30 shots take place at various locations in the camp. This sequence ends with a long shot, empty of people, of the ovens. The final four shots are jump-cuts showing the crowds of people exiting the camp, most of them smiling and looking happy. The last shot shows a large group of people wearing white tee-shirts that read "Travel for Peace" with an image of the globe and a dove. A girl associated with this group waves merrily to the camera. (Several people inside the camp seem to have observed the camera but appear to be intimidated by it -- they look and we see concern registered in their eyes but they don't gesture at Loznitza's photographer.) Often we see people looking with grave concern at something off-camera, presumably a plaque or some kind of photographic exhibit. The film is not about what the tourists see and so we are never shown the historical exhibits or written plaques in the camp. The objective of the film is to show us the tourists, not the camp and, so, with few exceptions, we can't figure out exactly where the visitors are located or what exactly they are seeing. An exception is near the ovens where so-called Sonderkommando extracted the dead from the gas chambers and fed them into the crematoria. There is a huge grim statute in that area, a kind of all-male Pieta of emaciated prisoners carrying a dead man on a spread cloth -- it looks something like certain Baroque and renaissance images of Christ's deposition from the cross. Most of the tourists wear white because of the heat and we see them rendered by the telephoto lens appearing like blithe drifting clouds in front of the huge, grotesque statues -- this shot has a very great formal beauty.
So what are we to make of this film. Loznitza provides no voice-over and no overt commentary. The deck is loaded against the poor tourists: it's a hot day and to say that they are casually dressed is an understatement and, of course, they guzzle water and, sometimes, even surreptitiously eat food that they have smuggled into the site. The camp seems huge and it's pretty clear that many of these people are tired, probably a bit numb from walking long distances. The film would have a very different look if it were shot in bad weather with the tourists wearing coats and parkas or if it were snowing. The tourists generally seem indifferent to what they are seeing -- but this is no different than what I have seen in crowds of tourists dutifully trudging through the Louvre or Versailles or the Metropolitan Museum. We have all experienced the notion that some places are "just too much" -- they are too big and overwhelming and, after a while, you just want to tick-off the highlights and get to a decent restaurant. Most probably, Loznitza's film documents a certain deficiency in the imagination, a defect that is probably necessary if we are to lead reasonably successful lives. It is not easy to imagine the suffering of another; something in our constitution, our fundamental make-up debars such imagination. If the people in the film were to truly imagine what was done to the inmates of this camp, they would faint or collapse in helpless sorrow or go mad. (And it's not just a failure in the imagination of the tourists -- if the testimony of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl is believed, most of the inmates in these camps couldn't quite imagine what was happening either and those who survived seem to have endured often because they couldn't, or wouldn't, comprehend what was happening around them.) I have often said this: if one were sufficiently imaginative to truly grasp with empathy the human suffering occurring in any one square mile of a city, that person would go mad. And, so, I can't exactly fault the tourists who are put to the test by Loznitza's lens and seem to fail by the rigorous standards that the film implies.
Monday, April 24, 2017
The Lost City of Z
The Lost City of Z (2017) is a large-scale, globe-trotting production -- the movie was made in Northern Ireland and on-location in the jungles of Columbia. (The picture was primarily financed through Amazon Studios, a funding source that rhymes with the movie's subject.) Indigenous tribal people ensconced in a national park in Columbia play an important role in the film and there are elaborate battle scenes (the Battle of the Somme), colorful formal balls, and a spectacular hunt with a hundred dogs and horses performing for helicopters zooming overhead. It's a period picture, set between 1906 and 1925, and, when the hero goes to London, the film shows us murky streets crowded with extras, steam, fog, soot and picturesque urban filth. About a half-dozen vintage locomotives roar through the landscape. It's impressive, as handsome as can be, but, ultimately, the film feels anachronistic -- it's a throw-back to the sort of movie attempted by David Lean in Lawrence of Arabia, intrepid Englishmen braving the hazards of dangerous terrain. Conscious of the film's atavistic appeal, the director, James Gray, and his screenwriter bow toward trendy political correctness -- an important theme in the film is the hero's admiration for the tribal people that he encounters and his desire to prove that their forbears were as civilized as the ancient Britons. But this doesn't change the fact that the film has a very archaic and stiff upper-lip -- in this movie, a man addresses the Royal Geographic Society with the words: "The jungle is hell... but one quite likes it."
Percy Fawcett was a household name within living memory. My father admired his robust and vivid travel books and his disappearance in 1925 resulted in dozens of rescue expeditions continuing for, at least, three decades. Fawcett is the hero of the film, an explorer who encountered (he claimed) evidence of an advanced civilization in the Amazonian basin. Fawcett, who was a tireless self-promoter -- an aspect of his life concealed by the film -- made three famous expeditions into the Amazon to seek a chimera that he called "the lost city of Z" (pronounced "zed" in this film). The Edwardian era was a great age of exploration -- it was the epoch of Shackleton, Byrd, Perry, Amundsen, and other adventurers who filled in the blank spots on the maps. Fawcett was among these men, a fellow either preternaturally strong and healthy or fantastically lucky -- Amazon exploration killed just about everyone who attempted it, but Fawcett was unscathed; at least until the end, he seemed to flourish in the green hell of the jungle. The problem that the film faces is that exploration is intrinsically difficult to dramatize -- the great explorers trudge through wasteland, everyone around them dies, and, at last, they either die or return to civilization to begin the cycle again. Fawcett went to the Amazon three times with similar results: people die, the natives attack, more people die and Fawcett fails to discover his lost city although he returns with tantalizing artifacts. The Lost City of Z is a big, prestigious bio-pic and, generally, follows the outline of Fawcett's life. But it's almost completely static as a drama -- Fawcett's longsuffering wife (whom he dependably impregnates each time he's back in Britain) grieves and rages that her husband is drawn away from her, they argue, the children wish their father would remain at home, and, then, Fawcett returns to the jungle where he suffers exorbitantly with his men who mostly perish from disease, insects, hunger, and exhaustion. Fawcett takes a vacation from exploration on the Western Front where all his men are killed around him in a frontal assault on German machine guns and where he is gassed with chlorine and almost blinded. Recovering from his wounds, Fawcett is induced to make a last attempt to discover the lost city, traveling light with his son, into the Bolivian jungle. He and his son vanish and are never seen again. Since no one knows what happened to Fawcett, the movie hedges its bets on this point -- Gray stages a phantasmagoria redolent of the ending of Apocalypse Now with innumerable campfires flaring against he black jungle and huge tripods filled with fire. A fictional twist at the end of the picture suggests that Fawcett discovered the lost city. I don't want to spoil the film's final shot, but it suffices to say that it is very beautiful, surreal, and strangely moving. (David Grann's source essay and book involve the writer's modern-day venture into the jungles that swallowed-up Percy Fawcett and his "discovery" of what archaeologists have known for a decade -- there was, indeed, an advanced agricultural civilization in Amazonia, but its monuments, largely involving monumental earthworks and canals, are hidden by the jungle. Grann's book ends with the writer surveying a landscape that he understands to have been intensely manipulated by pre-Columbian human beings: it is right there in plain sight, but you have to know what to see.)
A brilliant final shot doesn't equate to a great movie and, ultimately, you have seen everything in The Lost City of Zed before and in better movies. Herzog's Amazonian movies, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo (and to some extent Cobra Verde) have covered this terrain far more effectively -- indeed, Gray steals a motif from Fitzcarraldo, the opera performance in the jungle. (He even casts Franco Nero as the world-weary rubber baron, a nod toward the Euro-trash milieu occupied by the redoubtable Klaus Kinski.) Gray does a reasonably good job with this material -- in fact, by typical Hollywood standards, he has a made a film to rank with some of David Lean's pictures -- but with a few exceptional scenes embedded in material rife with clichés. That said, I am sucker for this kind of movie and shed a few tears while, nonetheless, convinced that The Lost City of Zed is pretty derivative and, ultimately, dramatically unsuccessful. A Russian soothsayer appears mysteriously on the Western Front and tells the hero that exploration is "his destiny" -- the scene is staged in subterranean bunker during a heavy bombardment. At the end of the movie, the ever-patient Mrs. Fawcett quotes Browning: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for." I shed some hot tears for this film, but I'm afraid that you won't.
Percy Fawcett was a household name within living memory. My father admired his robust and vivid travel books and his disappearance in 1925 resulted in dozens of rescue expeditions continuing for, at least, three decades. Fawcett is the hero of the film, an explorer who encountered (he claimed) evidence of an advanced civilization in the Amazonian basin. Fawcett, who was a tireless self-promoter -- an aspect of his life concealed by the film -- made three famous expeditions into the Amazon to seek a chimera that he called "the lost city of Z" (pronounced "zed" in this film). The Edwardian era was a great age of exploration -- it was the epoch of Shackleton, Byrd, Perry, Amundsen, and other adventurers who filled in the blank spots on the maps. Fawcett was among these men, a fellow either preternaturally strong and healthy or fantastically lucky -- Amazon exploration killed just about everyone who attempted it, but Fawcett was unscathed; at least until the end, he seemed to flourish in the green hell of the jungle. The problem that the film faces is that exploration is intrinsically difficult to dramatize -- the great explorers trudge through wasteland, everyone around them dies, and, at last, they either die or return to civilization to begin the cycle again. Fawcett went to the Amazon three times with similar results: people die, the natives attack, more people die and Fawcett fails to discover his lost city although he returns with tantalizing artifacts. The Lost City of Z is a big, prestigious bio-pic and, generally, follows the outline of Fawcett's life. But it's almost completely static as a drama -- Fawcett's longsuffering wife (whom he dependably impregnates each time he's back in Britain) grieves and rages that her husband is drawn away from her, they argue, the children wish their father would remain at home, and, then, Fawcett returns to the jungle where he suffers exorbitantly with his men who mostly perish from disease, insects, hunger, and exhaustion. Fawcett takes a vacation from exploration on the Western Front where all his men are killed around him in a frontal assault on German machine guns and where he is gassed with chlorine and almost blinded. Recovering from his wounds, Fawcett is induced to make a last attempt to discover the lost city, traveling light with his son, into the Bolivian jungle. He and his son vanish and are never seen again. Since no one knows what happened to Fawcett, the movie hedges its bets on this point -- Gray stages a phantasmagoria redolent of the ending of Apocalypse Now with innumerable campfires flaring against he black jungle and huge tripods filled with fire. A fictional twist at the end of the picture suggests that Fawcett discovered the lost city. I don't want to spoil the film's final shot, but it suffices to say that it is very beautiful, surreal, and strangely moving. (David Grann's source essay and book involve the writer's modern-day venture into the jungles that swallowed-up Percy Fawcett and his "discovery" of what archaeologists have known for a decade -- there was, indeed, an advanced agricultural civilization in Amazonia, but its monuments, largely involving monumental earthworks and canals, are hidden by the jungle. Grann's book ends with the writer surveying a landscape that he understands to have been intensely manipulated by pre-Columbian human beings: it is right there in plain sight, but you have to know what to see.)
A brilliant final shot doesn't equate to a great movie and, ultimately, you have seen everything in The Lost City of Zed before and in better movies. Herzog's Amazonian movies, Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo (and to some extent Cobra Verde) have covered this terrain far more effectively -- indeed, Gray steals a motif from Fitzcarraldo, the opera performance in the jungle. (He even casts Franco Nero as the world-weary rubber baron, a nod toward the Euro-trash milieu occupied by the redoubtable Klaus Kinski.) Gray does a reasonably good job with this material -- in fact, by typical Hollywood standards, he has a made a film to rank with some of David Lean's pictures -- but with a few exceptional scenes embedded in material rife with clichés. That said, I am sucker for this kind of movie and shed a few tears while, nonetheless, convinced that The Lost City of Zed is pretty derivative and, ultimately, dramatically unsuccessful. A Russian soothsayer appears mysteriously on the Western Front and tells the hero that exploration is "his destiny" -- the scene is staged in subterranean bunker during a heavy bombardment. At the end of the movie, the ever-patient Mrs. Fawcett quotes Browning: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for." I shed some hot tears for this film, but I'm afraid that you won't.
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