It's hard to accept that Clint Eastwood's brutal Western, Unforgiven, was released 25 years ago in 1992. I recall seeing the film in the theater. Only a few people were present: I was alone and there were two couples, hip young professionals that I slightly knew. At the climax of the movie, Clint Eastwood's tormented assassin snarls that he will kill anyone who opposes him "and kill your wife and burn down your house." The couples began to laugh loudly and one of the men, imitating Eastwood's distinctive whispered menace, growled -- "I'll kill your dog too." I thought that was pretty funny, although profoundly destructive to the effect that the director was aiming to achieve and I recall that quip better than the actual ending of the film. This story illustrates, however, the curious intensity of Unforgiven, the aspect of the film that makes it strangely fascinating -- Eastwood seems to be doing penance for three decades of mayhem on the screen, innumerable bad guys blown away by .45 magnum or six-shooter or shot-gun. The film has an exaggerated, almost masochistic, abject quality. Eastwood's anti-gun film partakes in the same hyperbole that characterized his action films. He's aggressively, savagely, violently anti-violence. When his character, Bill Munny, gets the fever and almost dies, he has visions of death hunting him down, a snake-eyed death with a head full of worms -- "I don't want to die," Munny moans plaintively and, then, cries out: "I've done too many bad things." And, in that line, we inevitably hear Eastwood's mature regret with respect to some of his earlier films, most pointedly, the pictures featuring the cold-eyed sociopathic killer, "Dirty" Harry Callahan. Unforgiven is an undeniably powerful film, and, indeed, deeply disturbing on several levels. It's also so relentlessly designed to indict the genre that it's not really much fun -- Unforgiven is the ultimate anti-western and it's so thoroughgoing in its savaging of the genre, so over-the-top with respect to the penance that Eastwood makes the movie perform, that it effectively kills off the form. The body-count in Unforgiven includes the genre of the Western. And, if you instinctively love Westerns, this film may fill you with dismay.
Unforgiven begins with tableaux of the lone prairie and a man digging a grave. The image was a cliché when it was first shown, probably around 1908 and Eastwood makes the picture kitsch by staging the scene against a scarlet sunset. It's convincingly familiar and, therefore, accentuates the body-blow we'll experience in the next sequence -- a cowboy mutilates a prostitute by slashing at her face repeatedly; his partner pulls him off the woman. A crowd of whores demands justice but the hardbitten sheriff simply proposes a humiliating transaction -- the two cowboys implicated in the woman's mutilation will pay six horses to the brothel-keeper in reparation for their damage to his property. Appalled by this outcome, the prostitutes pool their funds into a considerable amount of money, a thousand dollars, and somehow contrive to attract paid assassins to their village, Big Whisky to gun down the offending cow-hands. (The manner by which the prostitutes induce hired guns to come to Big Whisky is left unclear -- although the viewer doesn't perceive this narrative lapse as problematic.) Bill Munny (Eastwood) is a pig farmer in Nebraska living on a desolate and impoverished acreage. Munny was formerly a very bad hombre but he has stopped drinking and reformed. It was Munny that we saw in the first scene burying his saintly wife, the woman who has reformed him. (Munny, we learn, was apparently a railroad bandit and once blew up a train killing several women and children.) A psychopathic kid shows up and invites Munny to join him in riding to Big Whisky, killing the two cow-hands, and earning the thousand dollar bounty. Munny agrees and, on the way to the village, visits his old partner, Ned, played by Morgan Freeman. Ned agrees to join him and they set forth on their murderous mission. The film's opening includes an aspect that troubles audiences and that provides a precursor for the increasingly problematic events that will ensue as this allegory about revenge and justice proceeds -- Munny simply abandons his two small children (they seem to be about ten and six) on the farm to pursue this mercenary endeavor. This seems completely irresponsible. This plot element, of course, could be very easily eliminated -- all you need is a kindly old-timer like Walter Brennan or Slim Pickens to stay on the ranch and defend the children. But the film insists upon the fact that Eastwood's character just leaves the kids, telling them to "kill a few chickens" and that he will be back in a couple weeks. Obviously, the lure of some old-time violence and gunplay is so powerful that Eastwood's character is unable to resist -- and, even, willing to leave his children to undertake this deadly mission. And, this, is despite the fact that his skills as a gunfighter have deteriorated to the point that he can barely hit anything with his pistol. Furthermore, he's apparently forgotten how to ride a horse, can't control his animal, and falls repeatedly off the big white horse. (Death rides a white horse and so does Clint Eastwood -- recall Pale Rider.)
The story is complicated by a subplot involving a murderous British killer, English Bob, renowned for mowing down "Chinamen." English Bob (played flamboyantly by Richard Harris) goes to Big Whisky with a writer who is chronicling his exploits for dime novels. Big Whisky's sheriff, played by Gene Hackman, brutally beats up English Bob and, even, sadistically threatens to shoot the wounded man and his hapless bespectacled side-kick. This sequence establishes that the law in Big Whisky, played by Hackman's sheriff, with a small army of deputies, is itself vicious -- we don't learn Hackman's motives and he remains rather enigmatic. No one is allowed to carry a gun in Big Whisky except for the sheriff and his minions and anyone caught breaching this law is brutally pistol-whipped and kicked to a bloody pulp. (Eastman's Bill Munny suffers the same fate as English Bob when he first ventures into town.) Hackman isn't venal and we don't see him stealing or monopolizing business in the tiny village. Like Eastwood's character, and like people such as Wyatt Earp, he seems to be some kind of reformed gangster himself. He lives in a cabin that he has built incompetently with rain pouring through his ceiling -- it's rainy season during much of this film -- and, with his big goofy grin, seems oddly endearing when he isn't torturing people or kicking in their ribs. English Bob's sidekick stays on with the sheriff, banking that there will be more violence to report from him than the Brit -- the obviously Jewish writer stands, quite clearly, for the money-men and producers at the studios such as Paramount who profit from the violence that Dirty Harry and his ilk commit.
Of course, the film is designed to chart a collision course between the brutal forces of law and order exemplified by Gene Hackman's sadistic sheriff and the equally brutal forces of mercenary revenge represented by Munny and his cohorts. The whores are unrelenting in their demand for violent retribution, although the woman actually mutilated by her cowboy customer seems strangely remote, a gentle soul who doesn't exactly condone all the violence done in her name. The film raises a number of ethical issues: can one implement violence in the name of an offended party who doesn't herself demand revenge? how is law and order related to revenge? is there any role for forgiveness in this scheme? doesn't revenge inevitably bring with it all sorts of unanticipated collateral effects? who is complicit in the whore's revenge, just the prostitutes or the whole town that created the conditions that must be revenged? What can be solved by violence? At every juncture, Eastwood directs the film to make the violence look petty and squalid. A scene in which Eastwood and his partners "dry-gulch" one of the cowboys, gut-shooting the young man who pulled his associate off the wounded prostitute is exemplary -- there's no attempt made to dramatize the scene. Eastwood and his fellow simply sit behind a mud hill. Freeman's character can't pull the trigger -- there is an instinctive revulsion against assassination -- and Munny has to shoot the man. Then, the characters simply shout at each other across a bleached badlands. The scene is shot so crudely that it looks like some kind of rehearsal -- and this is Eastwood's strategy. The bad guy, the knife-wielding psychopathic cowboy, is killed by the kid when the cowboy is defecating -- the boy, then, gets drunk, renounces his share of the bounty, and vows that his days as a gunslinger are over. This leaves Eastwood to manage the final bloodbath, a scene that is a little reminiscent of the showdown in the saloon in Shane -- except that Eastwood doesn't impose any mythic apparatus on the shootings at all. There's no real build-up, no suspense -- Eastwood's avenger just shows up with a gun, mutters a few threats, and starts shooting people. Although five people are killed in the last gunfight, it's not staged in a way to be thrilling -- rather, it's like some of the sword-play in Kurosawa's later samurai films: people get killed so fast you can't really see what is happening.
Eastwood's direction is spare and simple. He eschews most of the pleasures of the Western. Although there are beautiful vistas, we see them only infrequently and the mountain landscapes are not foregrounded. Most Western directors love the sight of horses crossing streams and rivers -- here there are a couple such shots but they don't dwell on the beauty implicit in such scenes: the horses splash through ankle deep water and that's that. The design of the film, the tiny corrupt village in the middle of nowhere, harkens back to such movies as William S. Hart's pioneering Hell's Hinges, a 1916 picture in which a brutalized cowboy seems to rise from the dead to destroy with bullets and fire the entire town that mistreated him. Everything is shot efficiently. When Gene Hackman's sheriff tortures Morgan Freeman by whipping him, Eastwood focuses on close-ups to avoid having to pay for bloody special effects showing the lash tearing its victim's flesh. He keeps the camera at a discrete distance, probably because he doesn't want to spend money solving the problem of how to show the whip actually slashing Freeman's back. In this respect, the direction is similar to what you would expect on a TV western, the genre where Eastwood cut his teeth playing the part of "Rowdy" Yates, "idiot of the plains" as the actor later called the character. TV solves problems by finding expressive and inexpensive ways to show action. Eastwood works in this vein, focusing on a couple of close-ups and some menacing dialogue to make his point. As Bill Munny, Eastwood doesn't really act at all -- but he doesn't have to; he has only a few lines and he can snarl them in a way that pleases the audience without making much effort to show any emotion other than homicidal, if cool, rage. However, the film's signature utterance: Eastwood describing a murder by saying -- "you take away all a man's got and all he's ever gonna get -- remains laconically impressive.
The movie has certain faults with respect to its realism. Most notably, the town of Big Whisky, which consists of about 12 structures in the middle of a mountain meadow, is far too small to support Gene Hackman's sheriff and his army of deputies. Similarly, one wonders where the whores get their customers -- there are about six of them and no one seems to live anywhere near this town. But the Western, like many of its kind, is an allegory and these questions don't really occur to you while you are watching the film.
Sunday, September 3, 2017
Saturday, September 2, 2017
The Blot
I would like to claim that The Blot (1921) is a masterpiece, an important film in the history of cinema that has retained its interest and remains compelling today. The movie's director, Lois Weber, was one of the most important film makers in the silent era, the peer of Griffith and Von Stroheim. Weber made pictures designed for female audiences and she branded her work in terms of gender -- she exemplified a kind of art rooted in her sexual identity sixty years before this sort of thing recovered its cachet. The Blot was made at a studio in Santa Monica operated by Weber and devoted to the production of films that she devised. She wrote and directed her films, didn't rely on literary precedents, and made pictures on so-called women's issues -- subjects like prostitution and abortion. But, although she was very much a feminist, Weber also had many conventionally sentimental and, even, piously didactic notions -- she preaches almost without respite in The Blot and this detracts from aspects of the film that have real power. Furthermore, feminism is not incompatible with other more reactionary ideas -- Griffith was a world-class film maker, certainly the equal of Eisenstein, but he was also profoundly racist; Weber, who closely resembles Griffith in many ways, is obviously committed to a feminist vision but, also, structures her film's to endorse conventional wisdom, including some ideas that we would see as noxious today -- for instance, the film's reflexive anti-immigrant bias. The didactic tendency in Weber's films, very obvious in The Blot, and makes her pictures seem more tedious than they actually are -- watching her movie, you have the sense that the damn thing is actually more interesting than it seems.
The Blot concerns a subject rarely considered in films -- home economics. A middle-aged long-suffering wife manages her shabby genteel household on the tiny salary of a professor at the local university. The man is not paid a living wage and his wife, who bears the brunt of their poverty, has to constantly economize. The professor is a mousy little fellow, mocked by his students, particularly a triumvirate of cocky undergraduates from wealthy families. (A title explains "Men are just boys grown tall".) He has a beautiful daughter, Amalia, who works as a librarian. One of the three campus hooligans, a man named Philip West is intrigued by the young woman and pays court to her. West competes for her affections with a minister, a young man who is also humiliatingly poor -- his shoes are scuffed and worn. (At one point, he polishes his shoes with goose grease, goes on a date with Amalia, and has to fend off her cats who take a predatory interest in his boots.)
Amalia's family lives next door to prosperous Swedish immigrants. The Swede patriarch makes shoes "to ruin the feet of society women" and earns as much as "100 dollars a week." Amalia's mother looks down upon the Swedes as being uncultured, vulgar, and nouveau riche. The Swedish housewife, for her part, taunts her impoverished neighbors by putting trays of rich food that the professor's family can not afford in her window. At one point, she even moves the family's garbage can so that the cats owned by the Professor's family, which eat from her leftovers, won't have access to the food. David, one of the prosperous Swede's children, secretly loves the comely Amelia and wants to help her. Accordingly, Amelia is the center of romantic interest between three men -- the church-mouse poor pastor, the flamboyant Phil West, and the shy, kindly David.
Amalia's mother hopes that her daughter will make a good marriage. When Phil West courts her, she uses all of the family resources to host a lavish tea party. This leaves the family without money for food. In a painful scene, the professor's wife tries to buy a chicken on credit from a local grocery -- she is refused. She retreats to her house and seeing a plump chicken displayed in her neighbor's window as a taunt, sneaks into her adversary's back yard, and snatches for the chicken. Amalia sees this from an upstairs window and is mortified -- she literally shrieks and staggers backward as if fleeing from a ghost. (In fact, Amalia's mother hasn't stolen the chicken -- she puts it back on the window sill.) Phil West, who has seen the professor's wife abjectly begging for credit, in the grocery puts together a basket of food and sends it anonymously to the professor, a man that he has now come to respect. Amalia doesn't know about this and thinks that the chicken her mother has roasted was stolen from the Swedes -- this crime is the titular "blot". There are further complications. In the end, Amalia accepts Phil West's overtures and, presumably, will marry him. The final scenes of the movie are heartbreaking and extremely effective (and, also, unexpected). The poor minister, who Amalia probably really loves, comes courting a last time. He is rejected. We see a luminous close-up of Amalia's face displaying a complex array of conflicting emotions -- it's a superb and unforgettable image. Then, we see the rejected pastor walking away. A final close-up registers the anguish in his face, his sense of deep, almost tearful sorrow. In a longer shot, he walks down the street and, on this disquieting note, the film fades to black.
The movie is relentless in its portrayal of genteel poverty. Amalia is literally dying of starvation in some scenes. She has a cold because her shoes have lost their soles. We see her sitting on her bed, carefully stitching cardboard into her shoes, as she shivers with fever, her pale skin almost translucent, every bit as fragile and helpless as Lillian Gish. Almost every aspect of the film is effective -- the photography is clear, although without flourishes. The acting is very persuasive. The picture is fluently edited, designed on the basis of people directing either loving, or yearning, or hostile glances at one another. All aspects of the social milieu are presented with loving detail -- the rather patrician, Phil West, drives a boat-sized Packard. The Swedes have a brand new Ford, a model T. And the poor professor's family have to walk through gales of rain. But the whole thing is highly schematic, not really predictable, but certainly tendentious -- the bleak ending came as a surprise to me. I can't quite account for my sense that the film is strangely tedious. Perhaps, others who see this fascinating picture will disagree with me. (The Blot will air as part of a tribute to female movie makers on September 7, 2017 on Turner Classic Movies.)
The Blot concerns a subject rarely considered in films -- home economics. A middle-aged long-suffering wife manages her shabby genteel household on the tiny salary of a professor at the local university. The man is not paid a living wage and his wife, who bears the brunt of their poverty, has to constantly economize. The professor is a mousy little fellow, mocked by his students, particularly a triumvirate of cocky undergraduates from wealthy families. (A title explains "Men are just boys grown tall".) He has a beautiful daughter, Amalia, who works as a librarian. One of the three campus hooligans, a man named Philip West is intrigued by the young woman and pays court to her. West competes for her affections with a minister, a young man who is also humiliatingly poor -- his shoes are scuffed and worn. (At one point, he polishes his shoes with goose grease, goes on a date with Amalia, and has to fend off her cats who take a predatory interest in his boots.)
Amalia's family lives next door to prosperous Swedish immigrants. The Swede patriarch makes shoes "to ruin the feet of society women" and earns as much as "100 dollars a week." Amalia's mother looks down upon the Swedes as being uncultured, vulgar, and nouveau riche. The Swedish housewife, for her part, taunts her impoverished neighbors by putting trays of rich food that the professor's family can not afford in her window. At one point, she even moves the family's garbage can so that the cats owned by the Professor's family, which eat from her leftovers, won't have access to the food. David, one of the prosperous Swede's children, secretly loves the comely Amelia and wants to help her. Accordingly, Amelia is the center of romantic interest between three men -- the church-mouse poor pastor, the flamboyant Phil West, and the shy, kindly David.
Amalia's mother hopes that her daughter will make a good marriage. When Phil West courts her, she uses all of the family resources to host a lavish tea party. This leaves the family without money for food. In a painful scene, the professor's wife tries to buy a chicken on credit from a local grocery -- she is refused. She retreats to her house and seeing a plump chicken displayed in her neighbor's window as a taunt, sneaks into her adversary's back yard, and snatches for the chicken. Amalia sees this from an upstairs window and is mortified -- she literally shrieks and staggers backward as if fleeing from a ghost. (In fact, Amalia's mother hasn't stolen the chicken -- she puts it back on the window sill.) Phil West, who has seen the professor's wife abjectly begging for credit, in the grocery puts together a basket of food and sends it anonymously to the professor, a man that he has now come to respect. Amalia doesn't know about this and thinks that the chicken her mother has roasted was stolen from the Swedes -- this crime is the titular "blot". There are further complications. In the end, Amalia accepts Phil West's overtures and, presumably, will marry him. The final scenes of the movie are heartbreaking and extremely effective (and, also, unexpected). The poor minister, who Amalia probably really loves, comes courting a last time. He is rejected. We see a luminous close-up of Amalia's face displaying a complex array of conflicting emotions -- it's a superb and unforgettable image. Then, we see the rejected pastor walking away. A final close-up registers the anguish in his face, his sense of deep, almost tearful sorrow. In a longer shot, he walks down the street and, on this disquieting note, the film fades to black.
The movie is relentless in its portrayal of genteel poverty. Amalia is literally dying of starvation in some scenes. She has a cold because her shoes have lost their soles. We see her sitting on her bed, carefully stitching cardboard into her shoes, as she shivers with fever, her pale skin almost translucent, every bit as fragile and helpless as Lillian Gish. Almost every aspect of the film is effective -- the photography is clear, although without flourishes. The acting is very persuasive. The picture is fluently edited, designed on the basis of people directing either loving, or yearning, or hostile glances at one another. All aspects of the social milieu are presented with loving detail -- the rather patrician, Phil West, drives a boat-sized Packard. The Swedes have a brand new Ford, a model T. And the poor professor's family have to walk through gales of rain. But the whole thing is highly schematic, not really predictable, but certainly tendentious -- the bleak ending came as a surprise to me. I can't quite account for my sense that the film is strangely tedious. Perhaps, others who see this fascinating picture will disagree with me. (The Blot will air as part of a tribute to female movie makers on September 7, 2017 on Turner Classic Movies.)
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Dr. X
Here is dialogue exactly transcribed from Michael Curtiz' 1932 horror film, Dr. X : One mad scientist -- If she were my daughter, she wouldn't be up there on that bed with nothing on (other) than a nightgown just to satisfy some lunatic's experiment! Second mad scientist (referring to the comely and half-naked Fay Wray): Don't criticize Joanne for her state of undress! Indeed. Dr. X is a zany monster movie, tongue firmly embedded in cheek, that delivers a few macabre chills. The movie is stylishly designed, short at 77 minutes, and, even so, packed with all sorts of bizarre elements. The scenarist and director seem hell-bent to devise a horror film that contains all elements of all known horror films, something that surpasses with sheer crazy alacrity every other picture in this genre. Instead of one mad doctor, we get -- count 'em! -- five mad doctors. The plot and the heavily expressionistic sets, all looming beams and cross-timbers shot from low angles, strange cubist niches, and dense, but articulate shadows (menacing profiles and grotesquely enlarged shadow figures), incorporate aspects of The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, The Black Cat, The Cat and the Canary, and innumerable other pictures. The story is a compound of Jack the Ripper and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with comedy sequences and a lame romance tossed in for a good measure. This is a pre-Code film and some of the violence is stark and realistically filmed; further, the movie ends with a dirty joke, albeit one that takes place as a sound-cue only after the fade-out on the final clinch. This is the kind of picture where Fay Wray's devotion to her mad scientist father, played by Lionel Atwill, seems more than a little unsavory. When the cub reporter gets tossed out of a water-front morgue where he trying to snatch a journalistic scoop, he goes into the a nearby building that is obviously a brothel -- the soiled doves tease him while he makes a tough-talking, wise-cracking newspaper-man call to his curmudgeonly boss. Among the whores is one played by Mae Busch, showing an acre of creamy décolletage -- she's the actress who always appears as Oliver Hardy's wife in the thirties Laurel and Hardy two reelers and features such as Sons of the Desert.
Cub reporter Tim Taylor loiters near a water-front morgue apparently in New York City. He has a hunch that a mad murderer who strikes during the full of the moon has killed someone. His hunch is right and, after the aforementioned detour through the brothel, Taylor ends up supine and hiding under a sheet in the morgue. (This is played for laughs, hilarity in the morgue.) The murder victim has sustained a surgical wound to the base of her brain, an incision made by a highly specialized tool. Her deltoid muscle has been excised as well, evidence of cannibalism. As it happen, there's a sinister scientific institution nearby -- the Institute of Surgical Research -- where dissections are conducted using the very same special scalpel whose wound appears on the cadaver. The police investigate, without any real effect -- the police detectives' inquiry is just an ingenious way to provide an great deal of expository information. Lionel Atwill is the chief mad scientist at the Surgical Institute, a haven for other mad scientists. It's amusing that one of these scientists is the world's foremost expert on cannibalism. Two of the other mad scientists are survivors of a shipwreck in which -- you guessed it! -- one of the seafarers was apparently eaten by the survivors. The fourth mad doctor is a badly mutilated German surgeon -- I'm not sure what his connection is to cannibalism but he's ugly enough to be scary. (The shadow of World War One hangs heavily over the plot -- the cannibalism expert is missing an arm and the German wears a black monocle to conceal scarring around his eye-socket presumably incurred in the war). After these characters are introduced, the action shifts to a gothic castle on Long Island set atop cliffs above a perpetually raging sea -- this is Atwill's mansion complete with spooky hanging skeletons, weird Hindu gods, and a nightmare butler, the kind of role that Bela Lugosi would later sometimes play, a sinister hirsute fellow who acts as an all-purpose red herring. The leader of the cohort of mad scientists decides to stage an experiment -- he will have a woman simulate the lunatic killer's victim and, then, monitor the blood pressure and reactions of the other mad scientists, using this prototype lie detector to determine the identity of the real killer. During the first experiment, one of the mad scientist's gets killed by an unseen assailant. This leads to a second experiment in which all of the subjects are literally chained in chairs. -- it's in this experiment, conducted on a dark and stormy night, that Atwill's comely daughter, played by Fay Wray is pressed into service. Concealed in the woodwork, the resourceful reporter Tim Taylor watches the proceedings and comes to the fair damsel's rescue when the hideously disfigured killer attacks her. Tyler rears back, spits on his hands, and, then, lunges into fisticuffs with the murderer -- it's the exact same gesture that Huntz Hall would employ before leading the Bowery Boys into brawls in innumerable cheapie films made in the late thirties. Tyler kills the monster and ends up winning the girl. He's a scrawny, incredibly irritating chap, prone to playing jokes with a joy-buzzer in the palm of his hand. (Do you remember this item? with exploding cigars and flatulent whoopee cushions, joy buzzers were always on sale on the back page of the comic books that I read when I was a kid; I can picture right now the victim in the ad grimacing with hair standing on end as a result of the electric charge.) Tyler is a horrible mismatch for the winsome and sophisticated looking Fay Wray and you end up thinking she would better be paired with the dignified and nobly hideous monster than this twerp. The movie has got just about everything you want in a horror film: eerie shadows, dark corridors, corpses under white sheets wiggling around, skeletons goosing the hero, hideous murderers, and laboratories full of flashing Tesla coils and bubbling vats of fog-producing acid. It's all quite funny and the dialogue is totally "over-the-top" -- "I am making synthetic flesh for a crippled world," a villain shrieks. Another mad scientist shouts to Lionel Atwill: "Doctor, you've given everything for science including your daughter!" The film as it now exists is credited to the UCLA Film Archives and the print has been colorized -- this gives the movie the strange yellow-tint of the old German color process, AGFA-color. The color makes the movie seem even more peculiar. This is inaccurate -- see below.
(The Joy Buzzer handshake practical joke was invented by S. S. Sorenson, the Danish immigrant responsible for Cachoo (sneeze) powder, itching powder, bug in a ice-cube, etc. Sorenson invented the buzzer in 1928, which doesn't deliver a real electric shock, but instead relies upon a tightly wound spring to create a tingle when pressed in a handshake. A patent for the joy buzzer significantly improving the design dates back to 1932, the year of the film. Joy buzzers and other practical jokes of this kind were manufactured until the mid-sixties in Asbury Park, New Jersey.)
Michael Curtiz shot Dr. X and a slightly later picture with Fay Wray, The Mystery of the Wax Museum in a two-color Technicolor process. Accordingly, the curious color scheme in this movie is original. These films were thought to be lost -- at least, in color versions. However, color prints of these films were found in an archives in the United Kingdom and restored at UCLA.
Cub reporter Tim Taylor loiters near a water-front morgue apparently in New York City. He has a hunch that a mad murderer who strikes during the full of the moon has killed someone. His hunch is right and, after the aforementioned detour through the brothel, Taylor ends up supine and hiding under a sheet in the morgue. (This is played for laughs, hilarity in the morgue.) The murder victim has sustained a surgical wound to the base of her brain, an incision made by a highly specialized tool. Her deltoid muscle has been excised as well, evidence of cannibalism. As it happen, there's a sinister scientific institution nearby -- the Institute of Surgical Research -- where dissections are conducted using the very same special scalpel whose wound appears on the cadaver. The police investigate, without any real effect -- the police detectives' inquiry is just an ingenious way to provide an great deal of expository information. Lionel Atwill is the chief mad scientist at the Surgical Institute, a haven for other mad scientists. It's amusing that one of these scientists is the world's foremost expert on cannibalism. Two of the other mad scientists are survivors of a shipwreck in which -- you guessed it! -- one of the seafarers was apparently eaten by the survivors. The fourth mad doctor is a badly mutilated German surgeon -- I'm not sure what his connection is to cannibalism but he's ugly enough to be scary. (The shadow of World War One hangs heavily over the plot -- the cannibalism expert is missing an arm and the German wears a black monocle to conceal scarring around his eye-socket presumably incurred in the war). After these characters are introduced, the action shifts to a gothic castle on Long Island set atop cliffs above a perpetually raging sea -- this is Atwill's mansion complete with spooky hanging skeletons, weird Hindu gods, and a nightmare butler, the kind of role that Bela Lugosi would later sometimes play, a sinister hirsute fellow who acts as an all-purpose red herring. The leader of the cohort of mad scientists decides to stage an experiment -- he will have a woman simulate the lunatic killer's victim and, then, monitor the blood pressure and reactions of the other mad scientists, using this prototype lie detector to determine the identity of the real killer. During the first experiment, one of the mad scientist's gets killed by an unseen assailant. This leads to a second experiment in which all of the subjects are literally chained in chairs. -- it's in this experiment, conducted on a dark and stormy night, that Atwill's comely daughter, played by Fay Wray is pressed into service. Concealed in the woodwork, the resourceful reporter Tim Taylor watches the proceedings and comes to the fair damsel's rescue when the hideously disfigured killer attacks her. Tyler rears back, spits on his hands, and, then, lunges into fisticuffs with the murderer -- it's the exact same gesture that Huntz Hall would employ before leading the Bowery Boys into brawls in innumerable cheapie films made in the late thirties. Tyler kills the monster and ends up winning the girl. He's a scrawny, incredibly irritating chap, prone to playing jokes with a joy-buzzer in the palm of his hand. (Do you remember this item? with exploding cigars and flatulent whoopee cushions, joy buzzers were always on sale on the back page of the comic books that I read when I was a kid; I can picture right now the victim in the ad grimacing with hair standing on end as a result of the electric charge.) Tyler is a horrible mismatch for the winsome and sophisticated looking Fay Wray and you end up thinking she would better be paired with the dignified and nobly hideous monster than this twerp. The movie has got just about everything you want in a horror film: eerie shadows, dark corridors, corpses under white sheets wiggling around, skeletons goosing the hero, hideous murderers, and laboratories full of flashing Tesla coils and bubbling vats of fog-producing acid. It's all quite funny and the dialogue is totally "over-the-top" -- "I am making synthetic flesh for a crippled world," a villain shrieks. Another mad scientist shouts to Lionel Atwill: "Doctor, you've given everything for science including your daughter!" The film as it now exists is credited to the UCLA Film Archives and the print has been colorized -- this gives the movie the strange yellow-tint of the old German color process, AGFA-color. The color makes the movie seem even more peculiar. This is inaccurate -- see below.
(The Joy Buzzer handshake practical joke was invented by S. S. Sorenson, the Danish immigrant responsible for Cachoo (sneeze) powder, itching powder, bug in a ice-cube, etc. Sorenson invented the buzzer in 1928, which doesn't deliver a real electric shock, but instead relies upon a tightly wound spring to create a tingle when pressed in a handshake. A patent for the joy buzzer significantly improving the design dates back to 1932, the year of the film. Joy buzzers and other practical jokes of this kind were manufactured until the mid-sixties in Asbury Park, New Jersey.)
Michael Curtiz shot Dr. X and a slightly later picture with Fay Wray, The Mystery of the Wax Museum in a two-color Technicolor process. Accordingly, the curious color scheme in this movie is original. These films were thought to be lost -- at least, in color versions. However, color prints of these films were found in an archives in the United Kingdom and restored at UCLA.
Saturday, August 26, 2017
MIA (August 2017)
I spent a couple of hours at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. I was recently abroad for two weeks and looked at art in about ten museums in Berlin and Leipzig. Therefore, I have a basis for comparison.
The Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin has, at least, 15 Rembrandts, several of them quite beautiful. But it has nothing to match the MIA's heartbreaking and profound Lucretia. The Art Institute's Poussin, the intensely dramatic Death of Germanicus is certainly the equal of any painting that I saw in Germany, one of the greatest pictures in the world. The forest of lances and hands pointing upward sweep the eye into the grandiose vaults of the huge basilica where Germanicus, who has been poisoned, lies dying. But nothing can keep you from returning to look again and again at the greyish-green andanguished face of the poisoned emperor. It's an astounding feat of composition and highly theatrical beauty.
Frangonard's spooky image of a palace's park in twilight always amazes me. We see sculptures along a colonnade, a puff of fountain water materialized in the air, blurred and shadowy trees, a woman's back who looks into the darkness, as sober and upright as a chess-piece or one of Caspar David Friedrich's Rueckenfigur -- some murky figures gesture in the darkness and we can't tell whether these are real and animated courtiers, or mythical nymphs, or the mere statues of such nymphs. It's almost monochrome, wonderfully dark and atmospheric.
New to the museum is a very dignified and compelling painting of the Dakota war chief, Little Crow. The painting is said to have been made in 1863 -- at that time, the war chief had fled to Canada in the aftermath of the great Dakota war of 1862. In the year the painting was made, Little Crow with his son crossed back into Minnesota, tried to steal some horses near Hutchinson and, at that place, the great chief was shot dead. His body was scalped and mutilated and his corpse thrown on an offal heap in town where hogs were slaughtered.
The painting is by someone named Henry Cross (1839 to 1918). In the painting, Little Crow is portrayed life-size as an immensely noble figure. He looks like a clergyman (Little Crow was, in fact, an Episcopalian deacon) and his big brown hands are crossed in repose over what looks like a Bible. The Indian chief wears a beautifully tailored suit coat with brass buttons and a high collar nested around his neck. He is sporting a vest and cravat tied like a black bouquet under this chin. Little Crow looks enormously dignified and distinguished. Yet this painting was made when he was either under a sentence of death in absentia for his role in war crimes and atrocities on the Minnesota frontier (and on the lam in Canada) or when he had been shot down like a dog and his corpse mutilated on the prairie near Hutchinson. I don't know who Cross was or why he shows Little Crow as a heroic figure, dressed as a preacher and resting his hands on a Bible -- but it's a startling image and one that can't be assimilated easily to any of our accustomed narratives about the portrayal of Indians in the American West. There's no hint of racism in the picture and, yet, the image was made when Little Crow's hundreds of victims, settlers slaughtered on the Minnesota frontier, were still being exhumed from mass graves to be individually reburied. This is an extraordinary image, recently conserved, and well worth a trip to Minneapolis to see.
The Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin has, at least, 15 Rembrandts, several of them quite beautiful. But it has nothing to match the MIA's heartbreaking and profound Lucretia. The Art Institute's Poussin, the intensely dramatic Death of Germanicus is certainly the equal of any painting that I saw in Germany, one of the greatest pictures in the world. The forest of lances and hands pointing upward sweep the eye into the grandiose vaults of the huge basilica where Germanicus, who has been poisoned, lies dying. But nothing can keep you from returning to look again and again at the greyish-green andanguished face of the poisoned emperor. It's an astounding feat of composition and highly theatrical beauty.
Frangonard's spooky image of a palace's park in twilight always amazes me. We see sculptures along a colonnade, a puff of fountain water materialized in the air, blurred and shadowy trees, a woman's back who looks into the darkness, as sober and upright as a chess-piece or one of Caspar David Friedrich's Rueckenfigur -- some murky figures gesture in the darkness and we can't tell whether these are real and animated courtiers, or mythical nymphs, or the mere statues of such nymphs. It's almost monochrome, wonderfully dark and atmospheric.
New to the museum is a very dignified and compelling painting of the Dakota war chief, Little Crow. The painting is said to have been made in 1863 -- at that time, the war chief had fled to Canada in the aftermath of the great Dakota war of 1862. In the year the painting was made, Little Crow with his son crossed back into Minnesota, tried to steal some horses near Hutchinson and, at that place, the great chief was shot dead. His body was scalped and mutilated and his corpse thrown on an offal heap in town where hogs were slaughtered.
The painting is by someone named Henry Cross (1839 to 1918). In the painting, Little Crow is portrayed life-size as an immensely noble figure. He looks like a clergyman (Little Crow was, in fact, an Episcopalian deacon) and his big brown hands are crossed in repose over what looks like a Bible. The Indian chief wears a beautifully tailored suit coat with brass buttons and a high collar nested around his neck. He is sporting a vest and cravat tied like a black bouquet under this chin. Little Crow looks enormously dignified and distinguished. Yet this painting was made when he was either under a sentence of death in absentia for his role in war crimes and atrocities on the Minnesota frontier (and on the lam in Canada) or when he had been shot down like a dog and his corpse mutilated on the prairie near Hutchinson. I don't know who Cross was or why he shows Little Crow as a heroic figure, dressed as a preacher and resting his hands on a Bible -- but it's a startling image and one that can't be assimilated easily to any of our accustomed narratives about the portrayal of Indians in the American West. There's no hint of racism in the picture and, yet, the image was made when Little Crow's hundreds of victims, settlers slaughtered on the Minnesota frontier, were still being exhumed from mass graves to be individually reburied. This is an extraordinary image, recently conserved, and well worth a trip to Minneapolis to see.
Walker Art Center (late August)
In late August 2017, most of the Walker Art Center galleries were closed -- some sort of monumental exhibit is in the "offing" or, perhaps, the permanent collection is being reorganized and objects rehung or relocated. Three shows are on display: Katherine Fritsch's "multiples", sculpture by Jimmie Durham, and a kooky and beautiful interactive environment by TeamLab, a Japanese animation enterprise.
Fritsch's "multiples" are small sleek objects displayed in plexi-glass vitrines -- they are hats, a fly, various tools, some religious icons, and, most famously, a set of twenty fat black rats all tied together by their tails (a so-called Rattenkoenig, referring to the folk belief that groups of rats would entwine their tails to make a kind of living throne for the King of the Rats -- Fritsch is German and this macabre conceit seems like something out of the Brothers Grimm.) All of these objects are crafted from some kind of super-smooth, bland-looking and rubbery plastic -- the idea is that these objects can be readily produced, perhaps, by injection molding, en masse. The objects, accordingly, posit themselves as infinitely replicable, a perverse variant on consumer goods -- if you want three dozen turquoise-colored ten-inch tall Madonnas, Fritsch can produce these for you. The small-scale sculptures look like children's toys and they are brightly colored. Their surface-texture, however, is like that of an ultra-smooth Gummi bear and there is something more than a little sinister about the super-bland, perfectly colored and, apparently, infinitely reproducible objects -- none of them seem to have been touched by human hands. It's not much of a show and the conceit wears thin before you reach the end of the display cases.
Jimmy Durham is a peculiar case, an artist who is without any real signature style. His forte is chest-tall "combines" that look a bit like the work of Rauschenberg. Durham has tamed, I think, Rauschenberg's wild and unpredictable surrealist assemblies, mostly collages of objects that were non-figurative, into something more easily enjoyed -- Durham's combines are made from bits of broom-handle, odd appliance levers and springs, and the skulls of dead felines; the cat skulls are sometimes decorated with gold or inlaid turquoise or extravagantly painted. Almost all of these objects are figurative -- menacing or humorous little monsters. Many of the sculptures have scowling Indian faces -- Durham claims to be Cherokee although no Cherokee tribe in the United States recognizes him as an enrolled member. (Durham has worked most of his life abroad -- in Paris, Berlin, and now Italy -- and I think his work enjoys a certain cachet in Europe because of its American Indian themes.) Durham has a number of works that rely on puns -- he calls white people "pail-faces" -- and some of his objects are basically signs bearing messages about the perfidious White man and his wretched civilization. As opposed to Katherine Fritsch, Durham's works have a variety of funky textures; they are clearly and lovingly hand-made -- glass is embedded in some of them and they have hook-like claws extruding and, even, human teeth. (One of his grotesque little personages puts forth a tiny hand gripping a couple of human teeth and exhibits in his other metal clip-fist a sign that says "Mr. Durham's actual teeth.") There are some paintings, some water colors, and, most amusingly, a big case of containing various "petrified" foodstuffs -- petrified cheese and biscuits and bread and chocolate, all of these foods wonderfully and very persuasively impersonated by different-colored chunks of rock. It's an interesting show, not profound, but playful, and, even, a bit witty. However, there is something insincere about this exhibit (perhaps this is a residue of knowing that Durham is not a real, but rather a fake, Indian). It's hard to characterize the importance of sincerity in art. As great an artist as Andy Warhol didn't have a sincere bone in his body and this doesn't undercut his work. But Durham's highly personal "combines" somehow require a modicum of sincerity that the artist doesn't seem to possess -- he's simply too facile, too much of a chameleon.
On the seventh floor of the WAC, the Japanese computer animators teamLab have designed an environment consisting a dark chamber forty feet long and wide in which brightly colored crocodiles pursue equally colorful frogs while butterflies flutter across the floor. Sometimes, a great whale appears and slowly swims through the meadow of leaping frogs and hunting crocodiles where schematic flowers blossom and wave in the wind. The great whales are a mosaic of bright colors and they slowly roll across the floor surrounded by the leaping frogs and the crocodiles clambering here and there. You can make your own images, scan them into a computer, and, I guess, these picture will also appear among the moving animals and flowers. It's interactive -- the animation is something that you can enter and, then, experience on all sides of you and underfoot. Some big pillows on the ground can be shoved around to alter the surfaces onto which these whimsical creatures are projected. You can walk among them and when you step on a frog or a crocodile, the creature splats under your heel, flattening and spraying out a cloud of pastel colors in all directions. It's wholly charming and hypnotic.
Fritsch's "multiples" are small sleek objects displayed in plexi-glass vitrines -- they are hats, a fly, various tools, some religious icons, and, most famously, a set of twenty fat black rats all tied together by their tails (a so-called Rattenkoenig, referring to the folk belief that groups of rats would entwine their tails to make a kind of living throne for the King of the Rats -- Fritsch is German and this macabre conceit seems like something out of the Brothers Grimm.) All of these objects are crafted from some kind of super-smooth, bland-looking and rubbery plastic -- the idea is that these objects can be readily produced, perhaps, by injection molding, en masse. The objects, accordingly, posit themselves as infinitely replicable, a perverse variant on consumer goods -- if you want three dozen turquoise-colored ten-inch tall Madonnas, Fritsch can produce these for you. The small-scale sculptures look like children's toys and they are brightly colored. Their surface-texture, however, is like that of an ultra-smooth Gummi bear and there is something more than a little sinister about the super-bland, perfectly colored and, apparently, infinitely reproducible objects -- none of them seem to have been touched by human hands. It's not much of a show and the conceit wears thin before you reach the end of the display cases.
Jimmy Durham is a peculiar case, an artist who is without any real signature style. His forte is chest-tall "combines" that look a bit like the work of Rauschenberg. Durham has tamed, I think, Rauschenberg's wild and unpredictable surrealist assemblies, mostly collages of objects that were non-figurative, into something more easily enjoyed -- Durham's combines are made from bits of broom-handle, odd appliance levers and springs, and the skulls of dead felines; the cat skulls are sometimes decorated with gold or inlaid turquoise or extravagantly painted. Almost all of these objects are figurative -- menacing or humorous little monsters. Many of the sculptures have scowling Indian faces -- Durham claims to be Cherokee although no Cherokee tribe in the United States recognizes him as an enrolled member. (Durham has worked most of his life abroad -- in Paris, Berlin, and now Italy -- and I think his work enjoys a certain cachet in Europe because of its American Indian themes.) Durham has a number of works that rely on puns -- he calls white people "pail-faces" -- and some of his objects are basically signs bearing messages about the perfidious White man and his wretched civilization. As opposed to Katherine Fritsch, Durham's works have a variety of funky textures; they are clearly and lovingly hand-made -- glass is embedded in some of them and they have hook-like claws extruding and, even, human teeth. (One of his grotesque little personages puts forth a tiny hand gripping a couple of human teeth and exhibits in his other metal clip-fist a sign that says "Mr. Durham's actual teeth.") There are some paintings, some water colors, and, most amusingly, a big case of containing various "petrified" foodstuffs -- petrified cheese and biscuits and bread and chocolate, all of these foods wonderfully and very persuasively impersonated by different-colored chunks of rock. It's an interesting show, not profound, but playful, and, even, a bit witty. However, there is something insincere about this exhibit (perhaps this is a residue of knowing that Durham is not a real, but rather a fake, Indian). It's hard to characterize the importance of sincerity in art. As great an artist as Andy Warhol didn't have a sincere bone in his body and this doesn't undercut his work. But Durham's highly personal "combines" somehow require a modicum of sincerity that the artist doesn't seem to possess -- he's simply too facile, too much of a chameleon.
On the seventh floor of the WAC, the Japanese computer animators teamLab have designed an environment consisting a dark chamber forty feet long and wide in which brightly colored crocodiles pursue equally colorful frogs while butterflies flutter across the floor. Sometimes, a great whale appears and slowly swims through the meadow of leaping frogs and hunting crocodiles where schematic flowers blossom and wave in the wind. The great whales are a mosaic of bright colors and they slowly roll across the floor surrounded by the leaping frogs and the crocodiles clambering here and there. You can make your own images, scan them into a computer, and, I guess, these picture will also appear among the moving animals and flowers. It's interactive -- the animation is something that you can enter and, then, experience on all sides of you and underfoot. Some big pillows on the ground can be shoved around to alter the surfaces onto which these whimsical creatures are projected. You can walk among them and when you step on a frog or a crocodile, the creature splats under your heel, flattening and spraying out a cloud of pastel colors in all directions. It's wholly charming and hypnotic.
Columbus
Quietly exquisite, Columbus is a film of extraordinary grace, serenity, and beauty. This is the premiere production of a Korean-American director who calls himself Kogonada, the name of one of Kurosawa's screenwriters. The movie is a perfectly realized homage to Yasujiro Ozu, an exceptionally subtle and moving study of a life-changing friendship. Few films focus on friendship and I don't know any picture that studies friendship so intensely in the context of architectural modernism on the Indiana prairie. Columbus feels unique because of its intense invocation of a built environment and its romantically optimistic view of the architect as a sort of Promethean striver whose works shape the lives of those fortunate enough to live among them. Ultimately, the film is utopian -- great architecture, the picture proclaims, ennobles and, ultimately, saves lives. It's like William Carlos Williams' assessment of poetry: the architecture shown in the film does nothing but, yet, every day people perish miserably for want of the qualities embodied in that work.
Architecture is about space and distance, about the texture of materials and about the organization of light; great architecture sculpts the void between structural elements and changes the quality of the light and shadow that defines a building. To appreciate this vital aspect of the film, Columbus is a movie that must be seen on a large screen -- the picture is so exceptionally beautiful that the viewer needs to be aware of the highly designed color schemes, the exact nuances of light and darkness, and the director's use of bright highlights within his perfectly designed compositions. All of this might well be visible on a small screen but it would be "mentioned" as opposed to the way that these effects are dramatized in the movie -- the film is so remarkably designed that you need to see it as it was imagined, on a big screen, and, indeed, with a suitably hushed and awestruck audience.
Columbus is a family melodrama, a story about the conflicts between children and their parents. It's plot, like the buildings that it shows, is classical and beautifully symmetrical. A famous Korean architect has come from Seoul with his assistant (and possibly lover) to deliver a lecture in Columbus, Indiana. For complex reasons, this small Midwestern city is a mecca for modernist art -- there are eight or nine famous builidings in the city, many of them designed by the father and son, Finnish architects, Eilel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen. (We see local tour guides leading groups of people through these iconic buildings.) While inspecting one of the city's landmarks, the Miller House (Eero Saarinen), the Korean architect collapses, apparently, the victim of a stroke. His son, Jin, who is estranged from the great man, arrives in town to attend at his father's sick-bed. Jin stays at an elegant bed-and-breakfast (the most beautiful bed and breakfast in cinema history) and flirts with his father's assistant (played by Paker Posey). He meets a local girl, Casey, whose life is stalled-out. She's 19 or 20, working in a library where her boss -- he has a college degree and lords it over the girl -- implies that he wants to have a romantic relationship with her. Casey has had some bad trouble in her life -- her mother was a meth addict and the parent-child relationship has been inverted: Casey has had to care for her mother whose addiction has made her unpredictable and who has a predilection for "shit heads" as boyfriends. When Casey meets Jin, she impresses him with her knowledge of the city's architectural masterpieces even though Jin denies any interest in the subject. (In fact, he is very interested.) Casey escorts Jin to the various modernist monuments in the town and a close, if non-romantic, relationship ensues. Casey admits to Jin that she has had a difficult adolescence and, in fact, was saved somehow from despair by her contemplation of the wonderful buildings in her environment -- these buildings mean something very profound and heart-felt to her, although the movie has the tact to never exactly explain what this means. (In one remarkable scene, Jin asks Casey to stop parroting the tour-guide spiel and tell him directly what a building means to her -- the camera switches to a reverse angle and films Casey from inside the modernist masterpiece, a 1956 glass bank, and we see her lips move and her remarkable expressive face congested with emotion, but we can't hear what she says. In another remarkable scene, Casey confesses to Jin how a building's façade saved her life when her mother was entrapped in her addiction -- we can see the building through the windshield of the car in which Casey is sitting but Kogonada keeps the focus on the girl and not the building so that we don't really see it clearly. Kogonada knows that just as an architect uses voids as well as form, so there is a power in cinema in withholding things that the audience wants to hear or see.) In a startling admission, Casey says: "This town is big on meth and modernism." One of the big-name architects touring Columbus has recognized Casey's superb eye and deep interest in the buildings and has encouraged her to move to the East Coast and pursue a career in architecture, even offering her an internship in an architectural office, but Casey resists -- it's too easy for her remain in town, particularly since her mother's dependence on her gives her an excuse to not leave Columbus. The famous Korean architect worsens and Jin astounds Casey by admitting that he hopes his father will die. Casey's loyalty to her mother is such that this statement shocks her. After much soul-searching and encouragement from Jin, Casey decides to leave town and pursue a career in architecture. Jin now is trapped in Columbus -- in a way, he has succeeded to Casey's paralysis, unable to leave the city while his father, with whom he had not exchanged words for more than a year before the old man's stroke, hovers between life and death. The irony is that the young man who greatly desires to leave Columbus is trapped there; the young woman who desperately wanted to remain in town must leave. The film ends with 'empty frames' derived from Ozu -- silent corridors in Casey's house, a stormy sky, a bridge against the sky, then, a lower shot of the bridge, now less statuesque, with a car moving toward us with its headlights on as the movie fades to black. In all respects, this film is almost perfectly realized. Kogonada understands how to interpose architectural images, cubist thresholds and doorways and corridors shot through telephoto lenses with beautifully framed two-shots showing the principal characters on their wanderings through town. There are several images of willow trees in a green meadow that are so startlingly beautiful that they take your breath away. The acting is beyond reproach: John Cho plays the kind, but sometimes, bitter and angry, Jin -- he's superb. Haley Lu Richardson acts the part of the fiercely intelligent Casey. Both she and Jin are expert at showing something that films almost never attempt -- as in Ozu's great movies, the characters can be seen actually thinking; we can sense that they are trying to understand and articulate things and that this takes some effort but is worthwhile. Beyond the two principals, the other roles are also wonderfully realized. Despite the movie's use of austere modernist buildings as its backdrop and, indeed, raison d'etre, the film is extremely warm and generous. The only criticism that can be made of the film is that it is so intensely influenced by Ozu (and to a lesser extent Antonioni) that the movie seems a tiny bit derivative -- there are, maybe, a four or five "empty shots" too many and some of the landscapes are, possibly, unnecessary. That said, if a film maker is going to influenced by another director it's a wonderful thing that Kogonada has chose Yasujiro Ozu as his master. This doesn't stop me from wondering what this brilliant director's next film will look like when, I hope, he is a little less heavily indebted to the Japanese master.
Architecture is about space and distance, about the texture of materials and about the organization of light; great architecture sculpts the void between structural elements and changes the quality of the light and shadow that defines a building. To appreciate this vital aspect of the film, Columbus is a movie that must be seen on a large screen -- the picture is so exceptionally beautiful that the viewer needs to be aware of the highly designed color schemes, the exact nuances of light and darkness, and the director's use of bright highlights within his perfectly designed compositions. All of this might well be visible on a small screen but it would be "mentioned" as opposed to the way that these effects are dramatized in the movie -- the film is so remarkably designed that you need to see it as it was imagined, on a big screen, and, indeed, with a suitably hushed and awestruck audience.
Columbus is a family melodrama, a story about the conflicts between children and their parents. It's plot, like the buildings that it shows, is classical and beautifully symmetrical. A famous Korean architect has come from Seoul with his assistant (and possibly lover) to deliver a lecture in Columbus, Indiana. For complex reasons, this small Midwestern city is a mecca for modernist art -- there are eight or nine famous builidings in the city, many of them designed by the father and son, Finnish architects, Eilel Saarinen and Eero Saarinen. (We see local tour guides leading groups of people through these iconic buildings.) While inspecting one of the city's landmarks, the Miller House (Eero Saarinen), the Korean architect collapses, apparently, the victim of a stroke. His son, Jin, who is estranged from the great man, arrives in town to attend at his father's sick-bed. Jin stays at an elegant bed-and-breakfast (the most beautiful bed and breakfast in cinema history) and flirts with his father's assistant (played by Paker Posey). He meets a local girl, Casey, whose life is stalled-out. She's 19 or 20, working in a library where her boss -- he has a college degree and lords it over the girl -- implies that he wants to have a romantic relationship with her. Casey has had some bad trouble in her life -- her mother was a meth addict and the parent-child relationship has been inverted: Casey has had to care for her mother whose addiction has made her unpredictable and who has a predilection for "shit heads" as boyfriends. When Casey meets Jin, she impresses him with her knowledge of the city's architectural masterpieces even though Jin denies any interest in the subject. (In fact, he is very interested.) Casey escorts Jin to the various modernist monuments in the town and a close, if non-romantic, relationship ensues. Casey admits to Jin that she has had a difficult adolescence and, in fact, was saved somehow from despair by her contemplation of the wonderful buildings in her environment -- these buildings mean something very profound and heart-felt to her, although the movie has the tact to never exactly explain what this means. (In one remarkable scene, Jin asks Casey to stop parroting the tour-guide spiel and tell him directly what a building means to her -- the camera switches to a reverse angle and films Casey from inside the modernist masterpiece, a 1956 glass bank, and we see her lips move and her remarkable expressive face congested with emotion, but we can't hear what she says. In another remarkable scene, Casey confesses to Jin how a building's façade saved her life when her mother was entrapped in her addiction -- we can see the building through the windshield of the car in which Casey is sitting but Kogonada keeps the focus on the girl and not the building so that we don't really see it clearly. Kogonada knows that just as an architect uses voids as well as form, so there is a power in cinema in withholding things that the audience wants to hear or see.) In a startling admission, Casey says: "This town is big on meth and modernism." One of the big-name architects touring Columbus has recognized Casey's superb eye and deep interest in the buildings and has encouraged her to move to the East Coast and pursue a career in architecture, even offering her an internship in an architectural office, but Casey resists -- it's too easy for her remain in town, particularly since her mother's dependence on her gives her an excuse to not leave Columbus. The famous Korean architect worsens and Jin astounds Casey by admitting that he hopes his father will die. Casey's loyalty to her mother is such that this statement shocks her. After much soul-searching and encouragement from Jin, Casey decides to leave town and pursue a career in architecture. Jin now is trapped in Columbus -- in a way, he has succeeded to Casey's paralysis, unable to leave the city while his father, with whom he had not exchanged words for more than a year before the old man's stroke, hovers between life and death. The irony is that the young man who greatly desires to leave Columbus is trapped there; the young woman who desperately wanted to remain in town must leave. The film ends with 'empty frames' derived from Ozu -- silent corridors in Casey's house, a stormy sky, a bridge against the sky, then, a lower shot of the bridge, now less statuesque, with a car moving toward us with its headlights on as the movie fades to black. In all respects, this film is almost perfectly realized. Kogonada understands how to interpose architectural images, cubist thresholds and doorways and corridors shot through telephoto lenses with beautifully framed two-shots showing the principal characters on their wanderings through town. There are several images of willow trees in a green meadow that are so startlingly beautiful that they take your breath away. The acting is beyond reproach: John Cho plays the kind, but sometimes, bitter and angry, Jin -- he's superb. Haley Lu Richardson acts the part of the fiercely intelligent Casey. Both she and Jin are expert at showing something that films almost never attempt -- as in Ozu's great movies, the characters can be seen actually thinking; we can sense that they are trying to understand and articulate things and that this takes some effort but is worthwhile. Beyond the two principals, the other roles are also wonderfully realized. Despite the movie's use of austere modernist buildings as its backdrop and, indeed, raison d'etre, the film is extremely warm and generous. The only criticism that can be made of the film is that it is so intensely influenced by Ozu (and to a lesser extent Antonioni) that the movie seems a tiny bit derivative -- there are, maybe, a four or five "empty shots" too many and some of the landscapes are, possibly, unnecessary. That said, if a film maker is going to influenced by another director it's a wonderful thing that Kogonada has chose Yasujiro Ozu as his master. This doesn't stop me from wondering what this brilliant director's next film will look like when, I hope, he is a little less heavily indebted to the Japanese master.
Thursday, August 24, 2017
Cave
Cave is commercial filmmaking at lowest common denominator. As such the movie displays more about us than about the world or its characters and demonstrates the power of the medium at its most nakedly manipulative. Let Cave stand for all the instantly forgettable, pseudo-documentary horror films that stagger and stumble zombie-like through the multiplexes one after another weekend after weekend, all alike and all more or less frightening -- each Thursday, it's a new demonic possession or paranormal exploration featuring grainy night-vision goggles that turns out for the worst, another group of attractive, dim-witted teens exposed to hideous risk in some remote cabin or wilderness camp, another serial killer or zombie outbreak or reanimated corpse haunting the torture-porn corridors beneath some festering Balkan city. Cave is a Norwegian picture accessible with many others of its kind on Netflix. The movie has reasonable production values -- the camerawork is generally competent and the editing proficient. The film is dubbed, a ghastly effect, but one that you soon learn to ignore. The picture shows some spectacular landscapes -- high country in Norway with barren moors and sheets of glacier drooping down from low stony ridges, icy lakes, and huge roaring waterfalls. (Norway is almost gratuitously beautiful and the outdoors sequences shot in the mountains above the vertiginous fjords are wonderful in their own right.) The plot involves three thrill-seeking kids in their early twenties -- a feisty tom-boy girl, her clean-cut athletically inclined boyfriend, and, the odd man out and third-wheel, a damaged Afghan war veteran (apparently the Norwegians contributed troops to that conflict and, thus, have a ready store of PTSD plots that they can now deploy as a result). The war vet has shaggy hair and seems a little petulant, not surprisingly since he was previously intimate with the girl who is now sleeping with his best friend, The two men are obviously competitive with respect to the girl and, as we suspect pretty soon, it's a serious mistake for this trio to undertake the exploration of deep and watery cave somewhere in the Norwegian arctic. Even before they are underground, the boys are spooking one another, driving recklessly over the mountain passes, and acting erratically. At night, alone in the high mountains, the athletic kid seems to see a light following them in the darkness. As they are canoeing to the cave entrance, the boyfriend whistles the "Dueling Banjos" theme from Deliverance and the girl cheerfully tells the Afghan vet that he's playing the part of "Ned Beatty and so you'll get fucked in the ass." The vet purports to not have seen the film. Underground, there's lots of rappelling and trekking through huge rooms. The explorers find a pup tent full of bloody sleeping bags and it seems that there is someone in the cave with them. The boy and girl have sex in front of the war veteran. He creeps up next to the sleeping girl and masturbates. The film exploits exceedingly primal fears -- the darkness, extremely constricted spaces, watery abysses with floating corpses blocking the passage. The vet goes berserk and kills the athletic kid. He has spirited away a set of night vision goggles and torments the girl by stalking her in the pitch darkness. She rallies and kills him by bashing in his face with a rock. After some more dangers, the girl emerges from the cave, swimming through an underwater siphon to emerge, confusingly enough, in an open river. Hiking through the snowfields, the girl is picked up by an older man, a stranger who we have seen surveying the girl as she struggles to climb up cliffs in the river gorge. (This scene is an obvious homage to Deliverance.) When he gets out of the truck to get her a blanket -- she is trembling with cold -- this man whistles "Dueling Banjos". (Presumably, he is the psycho war veteran's father who we hear the killer talking to by cell-phone, possibly an accomplice who has lured other people into the cave and killed them, although this is unclear.)
The movie is scary, actually thrilling in a few sequences -- it makes the most of scary shadows, tight crevasses, and water-filled cave passages. There are plenty of "boo!" shock cuts. The plot is so vestigial it can't be counted as a narrative. Many of the scenes make only marginal sense -- when a tiny wormhole tunnel collapses and almost kills the war vet, no one seems concerned that one of the ways out of the cave is now blocked and inaccessible. The bloody sleeping bags are never explained and we don't really know the man's intentions at the end of the movie. The girl escapes from the cave by flailing around in the water, either descending or ascending, it isn't clear which, until she somehow surfaces in the river. This is really just a haunted house thriller, the gorilla in the decaying mansion, except that the haunted house is a cave. The dialogue is rudimentary. How did the vet hide the big night-vision goggles in his gear? Why do the boy and girl have sex in front of him? Will night-vision goggles work in the pitch darkness of a cave? Does Norway even have big, water-filled caves of this kind -- the film was shot in Rana in the Nordland province and "Mexico". (Norway does have caves like this and, in fact, an expedition into an actual water-filled cave in which two Finnish explorers died in a siphon seems to be the basis for parts of the story.) The closing titles begin with this legend in Norwegian "Cave 2 coming soon."
I hope so. I might actually tune in. This movie is very short (one hour and 11 minutes) but it's still not worth your time. But it shows how very little a movie has to contain to meet some of the expectations of its audience and to keep you watching for more than an hour.
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