The Kingdom of Shadows

New site

2007-08-28T14:30:00.000+01:00

www.likeanoldfilm.com

should be up and running soon.

2007-05-17T09:47:00.000+01:00

Shanghai Triad was a nice movie, though I wouldn't say it was a good movie. Partially on principle in fact, because I find Zhang Yimou's movies to be ridiculously overrated in the west. I think Gong Li is horribly miscast (her role should have been played by someone a bit more lithe), and on the whole I think the film has some messy storytelling, but it does some really nice work with the conventions of the gangster genre.

Two things in particular stand out in the film, one is the use of the theme of the conspiracy that the intended victim is using to his advantage, the second is some of the mother/son themes the work their way into this an other gangster films.

There is not much to be said about the scheme that is used against you plot, other than its a rather charming plot that is used most effectively in gangster films. The point of the plot being somewhere between "you're damned if you do, damned if you don't," and "you can't fight the wrath of God." If one takes the religious dimension of this plot at full face value (which I'm not suggesting that you do, but I have the impression that Borges was playing with it in the several detective stories he wrote around this plot structure) then the gangster form of the plot would have something of a devilish turn to it.

I have a deep sympathy for damned if you do damned if you don't plots, a sympathy that I never quite understood the reason for. The fatalistic plot is as old as Greek tragedy, and there is a seemingly insensible turn of logic in these stories that makes the glory of man his struggle to overcome his own insignificance. People in these gangster plots are going to their death as a moral imperative, which is a strangely beautiful concept. (This might be worth comparing to Blade Runner).

The kind of Public Enemyesque oedipal story I find rather interesting in this film. The boy's "father" is of course evil, and willing to kill him. His "mother" is a risque woman, which is nice. Whats good about that bit of the story is that the morality of both the man and the woman's position are outside of consideration. The reason why the boy sympathizes with the "mother" as opposed to the "father" is that he sees her out of context (or in the context of her actual life, as opposed to her active life), whereas the father is always rather shadowy. So the value judgment here is that the woman is a living thing whereas the gangster is a force. Action, forces that push you forward, always seem to push the boy a little closer to the grave.

2007-05-09T22:34:00.000+01:00

Dreams is, I believe, my favorite Kurosawa film, though I should note that on the whole I don't particularly like Kurosawa films. The more I think about it though, the more affectionate I become towards compilations of short films. About half of these films are great, half are rather plain, the few that are great are good enough to make up for all the rest.

The film is composed of a series of dreams that Kurosawa had in his life, progressing from several childhood dreams to dreams in his old age. The childhood dreams are quite amazing, especially the first. In this early dream, a young boy is told by his mother to leave his house because he saw the fox marriage which brought bad luck upon the house (foxes are a common demon in Japanese mythology), he goes in to the wood and sees a progression of people, he watches them move slowly, and then they all turn and face him with fox masks on.

Besides just being a stunning piece of camera work (no matter how much I find Kurosawa dull, I have to admit he knows how to use a camera), the film is positively eerie, and I think gets a much stronger point across than the overtly environmentalist pieces later in the film.

A point I try to make often in this blog (which comes from a rather outdated discussion in film theory), is that there are two modes of discourse in cinema, there is the allegorical and the ontological. The allegorical is where the filmmaker sets up a set, a story, a piece of editing, in order to say something, whether it be that Sally is going to kiss Joe, Sally loves Joe, or that we need to save the world from the destruction of the earth. In order ot make these points the filmmaker uses techniques slightly more sophisticated than a novelist, but the end goal is roughly the same.

The ontological level of discourse has to do with the disconnect between the intended meaning created through film language, and the physical presence of a human being on the camera.

The most interesting pieces of film use the allegorical level of discourse to denote the ontological level of discourse, but in doing play with the human experience of being. Godard is the ideal example of someone not narrativizing an experience but narrativizing experience in general (Wong Kar Wai does this as well), Tarkovsky and Sokurov turn being as such into narrative.

In this first piece in Dreams we are not being told a story, because there is no story as such to tell, there is no point to the story. We are being shown a dream, but it is not a dream, in the dream the foxes would most likely be either real foxes, humans, or both humans and foxes at the same time (dreams can do that), it is rather unlikely that the foxes would be people wearing a mask. The people are wearing a fox mask not because that is the content of the narrative (since the whole narrative is to tell us a dream), but because the dream has become theater... without a stage. The dream has become a real version of an unconscious moment (real in a way), without ever becoming real.

Reality and dreams are never as far apart as one would make them seem. That is all this piece is trying to say, and both can be so beautiful they are frightening. Or perhaps so frightening they are beautiful.

Worth watching, despite the fact that Scorcese should never ever try to pretend that he's Van Gogh.

2007-05-02T21:47:00.000+01:00

Kid Auto Races at Venice is a lovely film if you like Chaplin. If you don't like Chaplin then its sort of pointless, but that doesn't really matter, because if you don't like Chaplin your life is probably pretty pointless anyways.

The film is simple, it is the second film Chaplin ever made, and the plot involves him standing in front of a camera while it tries to film an auto race. Interestingly, people at the time this was shown probably wondered why this tramp was always in front of the camera (the gag of the film), but watching it now you wonder why the camera is paying more attention to the auto-race than Charlie.

The reason why the film is charming of course is that the tramp is a mythic character, he is perhaps the most famous character in the history of cinema, and in the course of his narrative (which correlates in time roughly the period of Chaplin's life), he managed to take part in dozens of major events, even foiling Hitler. Through all of these films though he never really 'impacts' himself on the scenario that he is involved in. No one in the film world knows that the tramp foiled Hitler and gave the blind their sight, but those people in the audience know that the magic to effect everything around him was always close at hand for the tramp, even if the little man didn't know it.

The story of the tramp runs alongside the story of Chaplin, the sad, incredibly handsome Englishman who had an unhealthy thing for young women and leftist causes. Who had a bit of magic of his own, and was, according to W.C. Fields "the best ballet dancer ever." Both Chaplin and the tramp created their magic and were swept aside, the tramp of course was beyond reproach, Chaplin unfortunately was not. But in a way more real then it might seem at first both characters were living their lives together.

The entire purpose of cinema, to my mind, is to show that there are aspects of all humans that are beyond judgement, that the movement of a series of still images has a certain religious beauty to it.

Kid Auto Races at Venice should not be watched for comedy, it should be watched to remind us that strange and magical people occasionally get in our way when we're trying to watch the goddamn race.

2007-04-29T19:41:00.000+01:00

I saw Buttoners about 8 years ago, at the Cinequest film festival. I originally was not that impressed by it, only thinking it was one of many films at that film festival which was entertaining, with a few memorable scenes, but not much worthy of remembering. The film came up in conversation though with my lovely Czech girlfriend, and what should I discover but that it is one of the most often quoted Czech films of the past 10 years.

The specific quote that one hears in pubs all over the Czech Republic is "Neřeš, nepřepínej!", translating to "don't try to solve any problems, and just don't change the channels." A lovely quote if I ever heard one. She says there are other quotes from this film floating around the Czech lands, but that's the most used one.

I'm more than willing to credit my dismissal of this film to my lack of a general appreciation of film as a medium, which is something I largely developed over the past six years. The two things I remember most enjoying of this film is the beginning where Japanese people are using American swear words in order to make themselves feel better, and the end of a film where the ghost of an American world war II pilot is trying to come to terms with the fact that he dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

This last scene has particular resonance. Only the dead can have sympathy for the dead.

2007-04-28T13:02:00.000+01:00

Despite John Water's joy at making fun of people who like Pasolini, I have found in my small experience with him that he is one of my favorite directors (I quite like Italian film in general though). The Hawks and the Sparrows can aptly explain why.

The film is absurdist Marxist comedy, involving two fools and a bird that can talk. The plot is essentially that a man and his son are walking down an Italian road, on the way to go kick some poor people out of their house, and they run in to a talking bird who spouts Marxist jargon to them. They end up eating the bird.

The film piles gags on top of each other, and it is really quite hilarious, what is singular about this movie is that on top of its humor the film is really quite beautiful.

In this film is one of my favorite scenes in all cinema. The young man, who is really quite dumb meets up with his girlfriend and two of her friends in front of one of those burned out houses that were all over the place in Italy after the war. The girl is dressed up like an angel for some cheap school pageant The girls take turns bad mouthing him because of something horrible he did, and he stands there stupidly grinning, and occasionally saying stupid things to try to make up to his lady. When the girls leave, he looks at the house and sees the girl in her cheap costume appear in different burned out windows. He grins stupidly.

People who make absurdist humor always seem to have some grasp of what makes life worth living.

2007-04-27T14:22:00.000+01:00

So it was bound to happen, given enough years of pointless warring someone was bound to become fantastically rich making homosexual fascist erotica, and well here it is.

The plot is a pretty simple metaphor for the current state of American foreign policy. Almost naked men with fake muscles (Spartans/Americans/Germans), go to stand up against these freakish looking invaders, led by a giant muscular effeminate wierdo (Persians/Al Qaeda/Jews), some people try to stop them (priests/Democrats/Democrats), but they go fight anyway. Their rivals in Greece are also standing up to the invaders (Athenians/Europeans/Japanese), but they are nothing compared to the Spartans (because Europeans are heathens/Japanese are Asians).

Now I'm all for violence in movies, in fact I encourage movies to have as much sex and violence in them as they can tactfully pull off. I am also all for the celebration of masculinity and strength (which, in all seriousness, is the main thing that this movie has in common with fascist propaganda), what I really have a problem with is the justification of violence for ideological purposes.

The Spartans weren't bad asses for an ideological reason, they did not stand for freedom and reason, or really anything else. They wanted to dominate their enemies in a world where dominance meant survival. This is why the most obnoxious part of this film is not its occasional gay bashing (and don't kid yourself the Spartans loved pederasty as much as the Athenians), its fear of things "foreign," its "whore of Babylon" type attitude towards women. The real issue is that the Spartans talked too goddamn much.

Compare a line from the movie when Xerxes asks Leonidas to surrender with a historical record of what the Spartans said when Philip of Macedon asked them to surrender:

From the movie: "Submission? Well that's gonna be a bit of a problem. See, rumor has it that the Athenians have already refused you, and if those philosophers and boy-lovers have found that kind of nerve..."

From real life: Letter from Macedonians to Spartans - "You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city." Spartans to Macedonians - "If."

Another example from when the Persian emissary asks for earth and water (surrender), and get pushed in a well:

in the movie: "You bring the skulls and crowns of conquored kings to my doorsteps, you insult my queen and you threaten my people with death and slavery...Oh I’ve chosen my words carefully Persain. Perhaps you should have done the same."

in real life: "Dig it out yourselves"

The point. The Spartans were a dangerous group of people, a nasty group of people who randomly killed slaves to keep down rebellions. Their history though records a time when life was lived more seriously, when there was a danger to every moment of life, and likewise people were required to do great things, which the Spartans were abundantly capable of. 300 reflects none of that, it reflects an insecurity among some Americans when deciding what to do about problems they face, and a bunch of awkward posing as a result.

More importantly though, I think the success of the film can be attributed to the real drama of the event that it was trying to depict, and the legitimate desire of audiences to see some high quality violence (that's why I saw it), unfortunately high quality violence is hard to find these days.

2007-04-26T22:29:00.000+01:00

To celebrate me getting kicked out of my apartment by my neurotic man hating roommate/land lord, I'm writing about The Lodger. Which is close to my favorite Hitchcock film.

Though some folks are in denial, I think anyone with a bit of common sense can see that Hitchcock made better films in England than he did in America. The reason for this might not be because he was in England, but might be because he was more keen to break the rules when he was in England, which was largely in the beginning and the end of his career (which is part of the reason Psycho is so good, it was done "indie"). One of the things that is so amazing about The Lodger is that it shows a lot of the talent that Hitchcock was not using in his later films, particularly the talent for visual narratives and stylization.

I guess what both those things are shorthand for is that the film is amazingly visually compelling, which on the whole I don't think that Hitchcock films are (they are narratively compelling, and he's about the best person in the history of the world next to D.W. Griffith at telling a story with film... and he's a much more likable person than Griffith). The film centers on a extremely handsome man who "comes out of the London fog" looking for a room, the catch is that there is a mass murderer on the loose, and men who are that sexy must be slightly dangerous (or so the police inspector thinks, who's dating the daughter of the family the lodger stays with).

Ivor Novello is great, he has that brooding sexy look that really all men should have when its dark and foggy, and they are always accentuated well by pretty girls in one of those 20s skirts that occasionally make my heart skip a beat. What's really great in the film is the lighting, and just the overall atmosphere of the film. There are few of the chatty people that add that creepy light-heartedness of Hitchcock's sound films (I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm pretty sure Hitchcock meant the light-heartedness to be creepy, he often put his daughter in those roles). This film does all it can to accentuate the danger of the situation, and in doing-so accentuate the sexiness of the main character.

The film really isn't about murder at all, its a star vehicle, and because of that the true purpose of the film is to accentuate Novello's appeal. It uses the threat of a mass murderer to this end... because the consciousness of death always makes one strangely aware of the presence of beauty.

2007-04-24T19:37:00.000+01:00

Despite my general distaste for George Lucas and all that he spawned, I quite like Star Wars 4 through 6, (and Indiana Jones 1 and 3, but that's a different post). I hate to reference "myth" in this context, because I hate all of Lucas' absurd references to the worst writer on mythology ever (I try to make it a habit to never mention the names of writers who I dislike, but his initials are JC). I came across Maud Ellmann's introduction to the novel "Dracula" though, which I think very aptly describes what I like about Star Wars, and b-movies in general. Here's what she has to say:

Bram Stoke's achievement was to free vampires from literature and restore them to folklore. For the Undead now live an independent life in the collective imagination, in which the details of Stoker's over-complicated narrative have long since been eclipsed by the luminous simplicity of myth. Unlike novels, myths depend on transformation for survival, each repitition altering the story while preserving its essential elements. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has argued that the true substance of myth 'does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells'. The strong the style, the weaker the story: a creaky novel like Bram Stoker's nurtures myth more effectivelly than the stubtlest artistry. In Dracula there is no development of character, no complexity of thought, no choiceness of expression, to distract us from the elementary components of the myth. The dead rise from the grave to suck the life-blood of the living - this is all we really need to know; other stock elements, like garlic, crucifixes, holy water, and so forth, are merely charming accoutrements of vampirism. Stoker's stroke of serendipity, however, was to transform his folkloric material into a myth of sexual initiation, in which the vampire seduces innocent young women into a world of voluptuous perversion. That Stoker's characters are flat and largely interchangeable is all the better, because their mythic function is never befuddled by the nuances of personality.
Nor does it matter that Stoker is a cack-handed narrator. His clumsinesses are notorious: his characters turn up at the wrong hotels, their hair changes colour inexplicably, and their speech lapses in and out of silly accents. More alarmingly, they conduct operations without anaesthetic, and transfusions without regard to blood-type. The text is peppered with exclamation marks, as well as with a liberal scattering of split infinitives. There are some groan-making puns: 'Is there not more at stake for us than for [Dracula]?', demands a vampire-hunter; and passages of unintentional hilarity: '[Mina] came into the room with an easy gracefulness which would at once command the respect of any lunatic.' Yet these ineptitudes do nothing to diminish the fascination with the story: the narrative tumbles along, unaware of gaffes and inconsistencies, as if compelled by a primeval force. For generations of readers who have found it un-put-downable, the novel wouldn't be so good if it weren't so very bad.

I know some of those people who have seen Star Wars once or twice, or thrice or six hundred and thirty-two times, might make the point that the characterizations in Star Wars are really quite strong, but that really comes down to Harrison Ford being charming, and not any inherent human drama behind the choice of being good or evil (depth of character is somewhat excluded from that dramatic battle). I watched the movie several hundred times before I could really comprehend that Han Solo was a jerk, but the basic idea (the force is with you), is accessible no matter how much of the plot you get, and the rest is just nice light saber battles and neat costumes... and the acting is fantastic in fact. Even Mark Hamill who is a bit of a ham actor, plays a whiny boy really quite well.

Of course Lucas is a pretentious idiot, so that means there ain't much too this myth. Except possibly that one should be prepared to kill bad guys (I believe George Bush has a missile defense initiative named after the movie, taken from Reagan). It was enough to sell millions of dollars in merchandise, but it should hardly give anyone a new hope.

2007-04-23T19:09:00.000+01:00

I wanted so much to believe that The Departed would be a good movie. I like Scorcese. Acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle said that this was a sign of the degeneration of Hollywood (it was like the sixth of his films to be remade), but I believed that maybe, just maybe, Scorcese had a way to move a Buddhist tragedy on to the streets of Boston, and replace the Buddhists with Irish-Americans.

He didn't though. He took a brilliant story and essentially removed everything good from it. The tragic ending was literally replaced by a pun, the gang boss is no longer the complex multi-faceted character he is in Infernal Affairs, and who's good side you really see in Infernal Affairs II(though I must say that Jack Nicholson was fun to watch), instead he's just a guy who likes to kill guys for money. The undercover gangster has the same relationship with his doctor, except with wild sex, and of course, just for the hell of it, they threw in a new character, who's entire purpose is to swear a lot (Mark Wahlberg was nominated for an oscar for the "part").

Ridiculous, its like a satire of all the previous crap remakes Hollywood director's have made of foreign films, except one of the greatest American directors won his only Oscar for this bit of junk.

As much as I never believed I would say this after watching Titanic, but Leonardo DiCaprio is this only real reason to watch this film.

2007-04-21T19:27:00.000+01:00

A lot of people died last week.

I live outside of America at the moment and have not been able to watch the media coverage of the Virginia Tech Massacre. Despite constant media coverage, inexplicable seems to be the most constant word on everyone's lips. The murders are just something that happened, and it baffles the mind that anything can be so horrible. Mr. Cho claimed to have his reasons, but most everyone seems to find his reasons incomprehensible, certain groups of Americans have found their own reasons, but none of these reasons seem to touch upon the fact that people have actually died. That the people used to be alive...

I was in High School when Columbine happened, and I think what was so horrific about the event to me was how quickly the victims became "the people who died," and the killers became "the people who killed." The Christian girl became "the Christian girl," and not a living breathing thing . The black kid became "the black kid," so the nation could discuss racism in relation to the trial. The killers became "the trench-coat mafia," so we could analyze young people's dressing habits.

As I said though, I have not followed much of the media surrounding this massacre. I read a few articles in the Washington Post which went between pieces that were respectably to the point, and horrendous pieces of exploitation. All of the coverage, even the self coverage the killer made of himself, belies a certain anxiety to narrativize this event, to replace the living breathing thing that has potential with an idea; silent isolation, being with god (the comments not the memorial), and of course 'tragic'. All the memorials though point to the illusive fact that all of these people were at one time living. That all the victims of the massacre made someone happy at one point, and other people made them happy at one point, the person was not an idea of a person, a person who has the attribute of 'being quirky' or 'loving Jesus' or believing in this or that issue, but that there was once an authentic human connection between this person and another person, that there was something like love, that there was something worthwhile, which is inexplicably absent now.

Moments like these, particularly the media coverage, deepens my belief that good and evil, and right and wrong are nasty concepts. There is beauty and there is horror, beyond that there is nothing.

2007-04-21T18:50:00.000+01:00

Can we assume that there's some truth to what the film dork in Scream 2 said, that trilogies are good but sequels suck? If so, no matter what people say, Infernal Affairs III gets the short end of the stick.

The plot in itself is decent. The bad guy from the first film is slowly being hedged in by under-cover agents at the police station, and its coordinated with some sort of fun Hong Kong - Mainland intrigue. Like the second film, but not the first one, the plot is a bit convoluted, which works for this film, because unlike the second film, it uses the same actors as the original.

My problem with this film is that the film does not fit in to the overall message of the first film, and therefore comes across as something of a shameless ploy to make money off a brilliant film. The first film was an ironic tragedy, that was perfectly structured as a Buddhist parable. The second one was entertaining but nonsensical eye candy that did little damage to the first film because it had fairly little relationship to the first film. This film unfortunately added to the first film by taking a tragic ending with a beautiful message (that there is such a thing as a 'horror of living'), and changing to the cliched message that bad people eventually get their due, which is a horrendous debauchery of poetry (I feel silly saying that, but its true).

I do though honestly think that this film is worth watching, just not as a sequel, and the connection to the first film should be minimized in ones head. The convolutions of the plot are quite entertaining to watch, and it is an entertaining film in that Hong Kong type way. Not to mention that Andy Lau and Tony Leung are monstrously good actors.

Infernal Affairs was a great movie that will hopefully still be watched decades or centuries now, Infernal Affairs III is a decent Hong Kong flick to be watched for entertainment.

2007-04-19T21:28:00.000+01:00

So a funny thing happened when I watched Infernal Affairs II... I had no god damn clue what was going on. I want to put my notes on the film up following my notes from the first one, but given this little deficiency I'm not sure if I can provide the deep analysis (musings?) that I like to provide.

The movie was a prequel, using different actors, so I had no clue who was who, and I in fact didn't really even get that it was a prequel until later when I realized that the actors were the same as the flashbacks from the first one. The plot is labyrinthine, the cops and the thugs from the first movie team up to kill some thugs from another movie, the gangster who joined the police force from the first film, falls in love with/kills the crime boss' wife (all men kill the things they love), other than the vaguely similar characters its connection to the first movie is rather sparse. There is a lot of conspiring between the police chief and the crime boss, to do some sort of manipulation of the underworld. Its all set to the end of the British occupation in Hong Kong, and that whole "end of an era" feel.

I did enjoy this film though, the acting, as is usual for this series, was all superb, and I have a certain affection for labyrinthine plots (Raymond Chandleresque, not films that don't make any sense, like the matrix). I also like that it reworked the "cops vs. thugs" story to a cops with thugs story. A much different version of the "if all these radios go of" monologue from the Asphalt Jungle.

The real problem with the story is that nothing in it is really developed fully enough. Even the driving force of the film, the relationship between the police chief and the gang boss is only moderately developed, the plot is too complex to interesting as anything but a backdrop (as in a Raymond Chandler story), and the characters you are attached too from the first film are mostly absent. The film is filled with charming moments. Anything with the gang boss is lovely, and the undercover cop does does nice things, but its not enough to the film focused. The only thing that really grabs the attention and holds it, is the affair between the undercover thug and the crime boss' wife... which is beautiful

Basically I'm saying, its worth watching, quite worth watching actually, enjoyable to watch even, but not for the story. Just for the way people move.

2007-04-18T07:36:00.000+01:00

Infernal Affairs is among the best action films I have ever seen, and quite definitely the only Buddhist action film I've seen. The plot, despite having comic book tinges and bad metaphors, develops logically from the youthful beginnings of a story, to a perfect tragic ending.

The plot is a generic "cops vs. thugs" plot, with the twist that the thugs have a spy in with the cops, and the cops have a spy in with the thugs.

The plot would be rather dry if it wasn't for the fact that the "cops vs. thugs" plot is a "macguffin" for a secondary plot about the thug spy trying to go legit. In the end he is unable to and is responsible for the death of the hero of the film, the under-cover cop. The film concludes with a line from a Buddhist sutra about the hell in which one begs for death, but death never comes.

I feel there is little to add to that plot which is so strikingly tragic, unfortunately the film was remade by Scorcese, who completely botched the job (I don't know what led him to think an American could remake a Buddhist action film, without the Buddhist), and Infernal Affairs III really botched the job by punishing the man who's punishment is not dying.

This film should have been left alone. It only causes further suffering to drag people out of their own private hells and expose them to the daylight.

2007-04-16T22:14:00.000+01:00

Y Tu Mama Tambien is a beautiful film, and honestly one that I am still puzzling over. In order to facilitate that puzzling I'm going to give away the surprise ending, and its enough of a surprise ending that one shouldn't continue reading unless you've seen the movie (which you should do... unless you are against sex).

I am eager to read this film as a "what would you do if you knew you were going to die" story, which could lead me to a lot of nice places. I am particularly interested in what draws the men and woman of this story together (speaking sexually of course), and I find it quite nice that the woman finds having sex with two young men to be more "real" then spending the time with her husband. Whether or not the film is, in total, an existentialist story, its answer to the existentialist dilemma is a rather interesting one.

I say that, because the film begs the question, what exactly is more "real," about these two boys than her husband. Though the director is obviously signaling this at certain points (she is going to tell her husband she is dying, he interrupts her and tells her he cheated on her), ignoring those obvious "he's a bastard" markers (which are always rather shallow, no one can be as big a bastard in real life as men in film have to be), the film wants to signify less blatantly that the careless sexual relationship has something of the religious in it, that cannot be properly encompassed by a socialized relationship.

Though I mean no disrespect to the religious people who are reading my blog, the concept of an "afterlife," typically considered, somewhat cheapens the idea of life in general. The woman in the film, and thus the film in general since the story is completely sympathetic to her, aims to experience life as bodily as possible, and thus as physically as possible. She attempts to experience beauty (sex with rather attractive young men) in the context of its constant erasure (death).

In this reading the message would be wholly pagan, and at the same time tragic (in the sense of Greek tragedy), because life is constantly being measured by the end annulment of its value.

In the Greek tragedy though there is always the prospect of history remembering you, and really, the truest tragedy is the memory of a person's disappearance to time. The boys do not learn any lessons from the woman, and the hedonism of the two weeks with all the accompanying "magical realism" is a matter for shame between the two of them. The only thing that remains of the woman is a mystery about what she was trying to say, like a ghost signaling without being heard.

I believe there might be a political message to the film as well, though I don't know what it is.

2007-04-14T00:03:00.000+01:00

I do not really have that much to say about The Man Facing Southeast, though I wish I did, because it really is a quite wonderful movie.

The plot centers around an alien, who everyone thinks is just a crazy person, and his doctor. The alien has telekinetic powers, and uses it for general lefty causes (fighting injustice, food to the poor, etc.), though not conspicuously.

One scene of this film is about the most effective use of magical realism in cinema I have ever seen. There is this girl who goes to visit the alien in the mental hospital, who he says he met building churches or something like that. He tells the doctor that he is particularly interested in her because when she feels passionate a deep blue liquid comes from her mouth. The alien is of course in a mental hospital, so statements like that are to be expected. The doctor later makes love to the woman though, and...

See the movie, its really quite nice.

2007-04-12T21:31:00.000+01:00

There is a lot in Eros + Massacre that I think is ideal cinema, though it does not seem to be able to decide whether it is a slow art house movie, a crazy surreal art house movie, or soft core porn, I think that's absolutely charming. Perhaps I should explain the "plot."

The movie is centered on the the life story of an actual Japanese anarchist that lived around the turn of the century (19th to 20th). It is intercut with the "story" of 2 college age kids in late 60's Japan. The anarchist talks a lot about annoying social theory, which allows him to get away with having a wife and two girlfriends and telling them that everyone is "free." He also is dependent on one of the girlfriends for money, but they're all radical feminist/anarchists, so they only kinda mind. In the end though, he decides to run off with the girlfriend who doesn't pay for his living, the other girlfriend finds them, and then there's a long scene where he gets killed or not killed by different women several times. Earlier in the movie you see him getting assassinated by government goons, which is how the guy (and his girlfriend) died in real life.

This is cross-cut with a guy and a girl acting crazy. The 60's in Japan were generally a crazy time, and universities were always getting attacked by riot squads with gas bombs (my Japanese teacher was in the middle of one of these), and people kept on joining radical organization, and so on and so forth. These kids are caricatures of Japanese students at the time, the girl seems to prostitute herself from time to time (it was a general policy in Japanese film studios at this time to never make a movie without a lot of nudity in it), and the guy is always around her, even while she's having sex with other men, the other men don't seem to mind though. Most of the time though, the two of them are running and screaming, and discussing the life of this anarchist, and various things that sound like social theory but probably aren't.

So, if I explained this film well enough (which I probably didn't), you'll notice that its a rather surrealistic celebration of anarchy, included with lots of boring discussions about anarchy. A somewhat appropriate film for the time when the Japanese New Wave was interacting with pink films (my favorite other example of this is Branded to Kill), not to mention a wonderful title.

But was sex and nonsense a recipe for success? Quite simply, the film disrupts our understanding of how a "story" works. The plot is really centered around two individuals discussing how a real life story "should" have happened, and because of cinema it did happen, in a strange acted way. The death of all these anarchists happened half a dozen times, but they never actually happened in the movie. All of the characters can become disconnected from time, and all the characters can freely disconnect themselves from common social mechanisms. The characters are in themselves just "ideas," trying to present a vision of freedom in a "free" space (cinema). The freedom they are desiring is largely a sexual one, but in the widest possible sense, in the surrealist sense where desire is a logic that is above the logic of perception (think Dali). The only way they can do that is by living in the world of film, where secondary logical patterns are quite often substitutable for primary logical patterns.

Of course the 60's showed us that film and real life aren't necessarily that far apart.

I plan on writing a post this weekend about my secret affection for soft core porn, look forward to it.

2007-04-11T21:17:00.000+01:00

I really quite liked Insomnia, the Norwegian version more so then the American version (though I enjoyed the American version to). While my reasons my seem a bit shallow at first glance, let me explain and I'm sure you'll agree with me.

My primary reasons for preferring the Norwegian version over the American version are,
1. I like low key prejudices
and
2. I liked the part where Stellan Skarsgard tries to molest a teenager

Now I know those don't sound too great, but I should also add that I enjoy watching movies with Skarsgard in them in general, but that pushes even with Robin Williams playing a murderer.

We take our prejudices fairly seriously in America, but I have been following for some time, with quite some interest, the general animosity that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish people hold for each other. This is something you can ask people from any one of these countries about, they hold a general dislike of people from the other country in a similar way to how a New Yorker hates a New Jersian. Swedes seem to be disliked more than the rest. This is played to a rather interesting effect in this film, when the girl tells Skarsgard that "no one in the class understood you because you spoke Swedish," what she is actually saying is that "no one liked you because you are Swedish, and generally dislikable," (the mutual comprehensibility of Swedish and Norwegian is largely defendant on your personal feelings for the speaker... I read this in a linguistics textbook).

The distrust of this Swede, who is there to catch a homicidal crazy, generally pushes the main character further into his own craziness. When Skarsgard, who exudes authority and "cleanness" in the film, goes on to grab the thigh of one of the girls from the local high school while she's riding on the car. This scene stands out more than others, because it doesn't have the creepy molester feel that you think it should. You really can't imagine actively disliking Skarsgard as much as everyone else. The film just, quite effectively, produces the Hitchcockian feeling of "I know I should be on his side, but something is not quite right."

That feeling really sums up the entire film, and unfortunately, not so much for the American version. Skarsgard plays a thoroughly dislikeable fellow, and it makes you uncomfortable how much you like him, as the eerie constant daylight makes you uncomfortable in a film noir.

The film leaves you uncertain how to feel, except slightly frightened for the human race.

2007-04-10T19:54:00.000+01:00

While I will admit on the whole, that I enjoyed the playfulness of A Zed & Two Noughts, I object to Peter Greenaway's work on the whole (or the two films of his I've seen). I'll describe my some reasonable and some unreason reasons for my mixed feelings about this film, and let the reader decide.

The first thing that really got me against Peter Greenaway, was that I thought that The Pillow Book, was essentially about how Greenaway wanted to have sex with a Japanese woman, but I'll leave that for another review. The second thing I dislike about Greenaway is the fact that he is one of the favorite directors of Res magazine. I met their founder once, and have held a high distaste for the magazine ever since, and everything that constitutes "digital culture," (including blogs). The third reason is that I find a fixation on "kinky sex" rather annoying, and Greenaway doesn't seem to make movies on anything else.

On the other hand I find obsessions with death, and strange music rather nice.

The plot revolves around two twins, who work at a zoo studying the decomposition of animals. They are both in love with a woman who loses both of her legs in (different) accidents, the first one involving a swan. There is a woman who works at the zoo, that is particularly mean and has a "thing" for animals. In the end (I'll give it away) the twins discover they used to be attached, decide to sow themselves back together, commit suicide, and record themselves decompose on a time lapse film. All the characters particularly liked the song "The Teddybear's picnic."

There were some other little bits of the story, but I think you can get the point.

What I particularly like about the story is the concept of scientifically studying something with absolutely no scientific meaning (studying the decomposition of flesh as a way to know the difference between life and death). The main characters are concerned with something that I think most people should be concerned about - the abstractness of death. Also, the main characters were concerned with the subject in the way that one should be concerned with such a subject - abstractly. In that way "The Teddy Bear's picnic," was really the perfect song for this film.

But the amputee sex and bestiality was all a bit silly.

2007-04-05T21:06:00.000+01:00

Murder My Sweet is a lovely film, and I especially suggest watching it around the same time you first see Gold Diggers of 1933. The reason being that Dick Powell managed to pull off a total revamping of his star persona for this film which was both impressive for him, and daring from the director of the film Edward Dmytryk. In Gold Diggers he is a chipmunk cheeked musician, who can sing, who can dance, and who is filthy rich. In Murder My Sweet he is a calloused detective, both charming and cruel. Despite the fact that he was singing and dancing most of his career, I must say that the detective is the better role for him.

Most reviews seem to disagree with me, largely because Powell isn't "Bogarty" enough. I would note though, that noir heroes were largely cast against their star persona. Especially in Hitchcock's movies, which really took off in the noir era, Cary Grant and and Jimmy Stuart always happen to have a bit more of a nasty streak then they would usually have. While Film noir stars were also cast for a lonesome look in their eye, but Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum can only be in so many films.

I would be actually willing to say that Powell's performance in this film is one of the film's main appeals. The film's plot is convoluted, as most Chandler novels are, and honestly I cannot remember it at this point despite the fact it essentially made sense (I can barely remember the plot of the Big Sleep - another film off a Chandler novel - despite the fact I've seen the movie near 10 times). What I do remember very distinctly is the femme fatale looking at Marlowe (Powell) with a sultry look and saying "I really... like men," and Marlowe smiling and responding "I'm sure they feel the same."

That's good stuff.

2007-04-04T12:29:00.000+01:00

Faust is my favorite Svankmajer film, though maybe for the rather tame reason that I'm not generally a Svankmajer fan. I'm a big fan of reflexive cinema though, and in that category there are few films better than Faust.

To be precise, Faust is a movie about a real life story about the play "Faust" invading the real world (the Marlowe version, if the English translation of this movie is to be trusted). Furthermore it is a puppet version of the play, which invades the world through stop-motion animation. Though this sounds confusing, I should assure those who haven't seen the film, that it actually is confusing, but it doesn't really matter because the viewer is constantly distracted from the story of the film by a series of sight gags, designed by an old surrealist to keep his work entertaining.

The main character of this film is tempted by a collection of animated puppets to act the part of Faust in both real life, and in a puppet play (the two intermingle seemlessly). The man goes along with it, seemingly because he knows that he is supposed to, and because his temptation and fall into the clutches of Mephistopheles is in the script. Of course despite the fact that it is all just a play, the man actually dies at the end of the movie, run over by a car no one was driving. As is to be expected when you play games with Satan.

If you read interviews with Svankmajer, he often talks about animation as a form of alchemy, as a way to bring objects to life. Something that Svankmajer adds to this essentially Shakespearian/Stoppardian tale about the theatricality of life, including its inevitable end (though Stoppard is also Czech, so there might be more to that connection then one would imagine), is a victory of the object over the living. The puppets that lure Faust into selling his soul for a variety of powers over the puppet world, are both objects and ideas. Mephistopheles in this film is literally made out of an eternal object (clay), while personifying a cultural fear (evil). Both the "essences" of the puppet are particularly impervious to time, while, as this film clearly shows, the essences of men can die off at a moments notice.

It is a contrast only Svankmajer could pull off. His little animated objects are always mocking us, because it is the objects that we interact with, which are slowly driving us to our death.

2007-04-02T12:18:00.000+01:00

Murneau's version of the Faust tale is a bit of a strange one. The story is actually a combination of Faust and the book of Job, where someones fidelity to the holy spirit is the tested at the expense of hundreds of lives and countless amounts of suffering. The only major difference being that Faust is dealing with the temptation to bed a bunch of hot princesses, and Job is dealing with the temptation to not suffer. Other than that though, its all pretty standard.

I've never been as big a fan of the Faust tale as many people are. It deals with some of the dullest aspects of Christian mythology and its concept of sin is horribly abstract. This film has it even worse because the concept of redemption is just as abstract, and seems to come straight out of a D.W. Griffith film (I mean that in a bad way, I like D.W. Griffith films, but he was more than a bit naive).

What I mean is that, the Faust myth, and especially this version of it, deals with acknowledging yourself as weak, corrupt, and small, and argues that you have to put yourself below another (God) in order to give yourself meaning. This is the bit of Christian morality that Nietzsche referred to as "slave morality," anything having to do with redemption really... In this version of the myth there is a second way to "redeem oneself," through the embodiment of a god-like metaphysical concept - love. Whatever the hell that means.

If you read any of my other postings about love, I make the point regularly that the "what is love" question is much more interesting then the "value of love" question. This film kind of takes for granted some rather generic answers to the question. In this film, and a number of other films from around this time (especially Griffith films), love is self-sacrifice, especially as it exists in relation to family (I work 50 hours a week for you kids, and what appreciation do I get?!). There is none of the metaphysical wonder that arises from the perception of beauty, that uncontrollable excitement from seeing someone and hearing someone. There is only a kid of hopeless pleasure in someone else's happiness.

The real pleasure of this film is watching Murneau's cinematography and Emil Jannings' acting. It is no wonder that Jannings played played Mephisto in this film. In this film, only evil is supposed to give a feeling of awe.

2007-03-20T13:48:00.000+01:00

Three to a Match is a delightful pre-code comedy that, in my humble opinion, is one of the most damning critiques of sexual morality that I have ever seen.

I am probably exaggerating, but I am comfortable making such a bold statement, because I generally don't think to highly of "critiques of sexual morality." Such films fall largely into two groups - the attempts of filmmakers who wish they had lived through the sixties to use the "sexual revolution" to justify the production of films bordering on pornography, and the attempt by filmmakers who read to much 70s structuralist theory to break down the scopophilic desire inherent in the filmic medium to free women from the horrible fate of being desired by men (used for masturbation of a different sort). This film does something wholly different, it defends sexual morality as the best way to lead to a boring life, and gives a rather beautiful portrayal of feminine desire leading to death.

The plot goes as so: Three girls graduate from middle school, one is really rich and goes to an expensive prep school, one is really smart and goes to a training school for secretary work, and one is really popular with boys, and in the course of time goes to a correctional institution. They meet up later, by accident, and the rich girl has married a rich man and is taking care of a small child, the smart girl has been doing secretarial work, and the girl from the correctional institution is now reformed. But then everything takes a turn. The rich girl is board with her life, and her always nice and accommodating (though overworked and effeminate) husband allows her to go on a trip to Europe alone with their kid. While on the trip she sleeps with a young good looking, masculine guy, and from then on she seems to do nothing besides drink and have sex. The other two girls find her one day, and discover the kid horribly neglected, they tell the father, who comes and takes the kid away, and invites the two girls to move in with him, one as the kids nanny (the smart girl) and one as his wife (the correctional institute girl). The rich girl dies.

About 90 percent of all movies that contain some reference to female sexuality, female sexuality is a commodity. It is something a man has to "get." Up until the 1950's female sexuality was obtained through marriage, after the 1950's largely through charm. Even today, if you read any of those books like Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, you'll find that the concept that women have sexual desire is somewhat controversial. Though now it is termed somewhat differently then the days when we lived with the delusion that men desire women, and women desire marriage. Anything that tries to convince you that female desire is fundamentally different from male desire is essentially saying when you get down to it that men desire women, and women desire marriage.

This idea that "men desire women, and women desire marriage," goes out of fashion every now and then, and is replaced by another fiction, that female desire and male desire are almost the same except that female sexuality is much stronger. This is by and large the position taken by most sex comedies made in the 20s (Clara Bow) and early 30s (all pre-code sex comdies), until it was more or less explicitly banned by the production code and never really came back in the United States (it is something of a cliché in British comedies).

While I would never argue that this second fiction is "right," I would quite definitely argue that it is the more progressive view of sexuality, as can be clearly seen in this film (or most any Clara Bow film). While the film ostensibly punishes her "wild sexuality," it treats both her and her friend's sexuality rather lovingly. The scene where the rich girl and school dorm mates are reading romance novels together is positively lovely, and the scenes of the girls in the correctional institution are similarly fond of its subjects. You cannot help but identify with the girls in every one of their interactions with men, and of course, the one who was boy-crazy in the beginning ends up with the rich guy in the end.

Of course reading the moral leanings of each individual event, and the juxtaposition of those events, would be a tiring affair and not to the point. The point is that it is no accident that the last 'gag' of the film rings somewhat bitterly, because despite being ostensibly a moral tale about the dangers of uncontrolled sex, the way the film is structured the "morality of sex" is never part of the equation. The female desire of men is the one unqualified good in this film, it is the one place where there is the opportunity for hope, for life, everything else in the film is being judged for its inability to provide a location for this type of interaction to flourish. Not only the women, not only the men, not only the correctional institution, work, alcohol and children; the entire world is being judged, because it fails to make room for something beautiful.

More than one person dies at the end of this film.

Buy Three on a Match on video here

2007-03-12T21:44:00.000+01:00

I honestly cannot decide whether Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a fantastic movie or really horrendously horrible. So I am going to briefly describe what I find interesting aboutit and let you determine (comments encouraged!).

I love musicals, because they tend to replace causal logic with singing and dancing, and generally causal logic is a negative in films, whereas I consider singing and dancing to be positives. This film shows off the full extent causal logic can be done away in a musical plot, and it does so straight out of the gate.

The main character is a mountain man, who comes to town to get a wife. He manages to find a woman to marry him and go up to the mountains that same day, largely because of the quality of his singing. She gets up to the mountains and finds out he has six brothers, and she has to take care of them all. She ain't too much into that, so the oldest brother decides they all need women too (because obviously they can't take care of themselves). There are various hijinx while trying to collect these women, but since the boys are brutes they don't have much success. They go back up to the mountain and the woman teaches them all manners, so at the next country dance they can impress these ladies with their charm.

Of course the competition between them and the town boys really comes down to a dance-off, which the town boys only win because they cheat. The brothers all go to town later and kidnap the women, taking them up to the mountain. Of course the women don't like that they have been absconded with, and so they refuse to talk to the men. Still, there is an avalanche, and they are stuck up there all summer, and get to liking each other. There is a climax where everything is resolved... primarily through dancing.

While there is nothing truly more obnoxious than a singing dancing mountain man (I mean that seriously), the breakdowns in logic that this film seems to enjoy flouting have their inevitable charm. While the complete disregard for anything that can be considered normal sexuality is a bit too absurd to be "subversive" (I mean that in a good way), I'm sure that won't stop those keen to interpret messages into a film to find a progressive or conservative message in the constant sexual posing. God knows what message it is they will find.

I know there is a large crowd out there that enjoys camp, but I am quite definatly not one of them. Camp is usually developed from "exposing social codes," through absurd juxtapositions of these codes, as opposed to pure nonsense which exposes the abstract workings of the self through presenting sensory imaginings.

That may not have entirely made sense, but what I am trying to say is that the musical is utopian, whereas camp tries to prove that utopianism is false. In doing that it only proves that camp isn't very intelligent.

2007-03-10T13:19:00.000+01:00

Triumph of the Will, is a well made and beautiful movie, that is hard to watch without lowering ones impression of the human race in general.

It was one of Hitler's favorite movies.

The film, made of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremburg, was made by one of the most brilliant lady filmmakers in history. It is a documentary in the old documentary tradition (a collection of juxtaposed shots used to invoke a mood rather than explain a situation). The general way the film works is it juxtaposes, shots of crowns, shots of smiling beautiful women, shots of children, shots of men "doing their duty," shots of Hitler looking friendly, more shots of beautiful women.

The entire thing is gorgeously shot, but it is impossible to watch without a shudder. Not because Hitler is so evil, but because it is easy to understand in this movie why everyone loved him. The film really shows you everything that humans are proud of in society, a commitment to work, caring for children, beautiful men and women, a nice combination of strength and affection, which is what being a community is really about. The film shows you how Hitler really stood for this 'community' of the German people, just as any other politician does for their particular constituancy.

Of course watching it today, it serves as a reminder of just how easily humans can be led to murder.

2007-03-10T11:57:00.000+01:00

I saw Who Wants to Kill Jessie rather recently, and I freakin' loved it. It has all the typical aspects of a surrealist comedy, vaguely insane people "entering each other's worlds." In this case though the interaction of two worlds was taken quite literally.

The film is about two scientists who are married and don't particularly like each other (the woman is mean). The man is the head of a factory, and he is trying to invent anti-gravity gloves (which he read about in a comic book) to fix a perpetually disrepaired factory. The woman has just become highly praised because she invented a syrum to change people's dreams.

The problem is, that when the dreams are destroyed in the person's head, they come alive in real life!!!! So when a man is dreaming about the characters in the comic book (one of which is a scientist girl with a lovely 60s dress that is constantly in disrepair, showing off her quite impressive legs and cleavage), his wife decides to change his dream so he is thinking about her, and unknowingly brings the comic book characters to life.

You can imagine what follows. A lovely girl being chased around Prague by a strongman and a cowboy, all of which talk with speech bubbles and get up to all sorts of hijinx. It becomes public, the man gets arrested for letting his dreams run loose, but then escapes, builds the anti-gravity gloves and saves the day (ending up with the lovely comic book girl).

I wouldn't analyze the film too deeply, its just a crazy and lovely film (with great comedic timing), about all the wonderful things that can happen when you dream about beautiful scientist girls from comic books. Or in other words, when you try and inject some magic into the world.

2007-03-08T21:49:00.000+01:00

The White Sheik is a rather plain film about two subjects which Italian film seems to have an obsession with - Infidelity and Catholicism. It is saved by the fact that it is an early film by Fellini, and has moments of near divine inspiration.

One moment, to be specific. The man has given up looking for his wife (who was taken away on a whirlwind adventure), and he is sitting on the edge of a fountain in a town square in Rome, bemoaning the sad fate of his week old marriage. Up walks two prostitutes. They don't look like normal prostitutes, they look like normal women, but they are quite defiantly prostitutes. One (who is talking really fast) sees him and wants to find out whats wrong with him, she runs over to him, and her and her friend manage to get the entire story about his lost love. The fast talking one has a somewhat playful sympathy for him, while the other a more honest sympathy for him. Then an old man shows up who the girls know, the fast talking one runs to him, talks about how he is, and convinces him to do his fire breathing trick.

The old man is breathing fire like a carnival man performing for a little girl, while the other prostitute says she is taking the man to her place.

The image is beautiful. The contrast of the two virginal characters who hobnob with the elite (the girl of which is missing), and the two innocent prostitutes who play with street hobos drives home, not a point, but a feeling for the complexity of what it means to be fulfilled (innocent is an ugly word, but its probably the word Fellini would have used).

More than anything its a beautiful shot.

2007-03-07T21:19:00.000+01:00

This might be a short post, because I'm not entirely certain what to make of this movie.

The plot of Aimless Walk is fairly simple, a guy is taking an aimless walk, then while sitting in the grass he turns into two people, and one of the two people walks away.

Its a short film, made by a decently well known Czech filmmaker, who is now better known for being Maya Deren's husband. You may walk away from the film feeling rather ambivalent towards it.

That's how I felt at first, but it stuck with me. There's something eerie about this film. It's like The Student of Prague if the double was never heard from again, and no one got anything out of it. The loss of the double doesn't even seem to be something strange, it seems more just to be something that happens.

A little change in your day, that leaves you feeling not quite yourself.

2007-03-06T20:01:00.000+01:00

Those of you out there who are inclined to synthesize information, may read the bizarre number of posts where I try to tie issues like love, death, religion, and surrealism, into a single movie that's ostensibly about cops, robbers, or spaceships, and think that I can read these four subjects into anything. Of course some others might glance at the database nature of this site, and come to the conclusion I'm not one who is inclined to synthesize information.

I mention this now, because Jesus' Son is another movie that I enthusiastically enjoy because of its ability to combine death, love, and certain surreal moments, with an overwhelming religious tone. Though there are differences between this movie and other movies I have noted thus far, I would classify the films as part of the same general "conversation."

The film is based on a series of short-stories by Denis Johnson centered on this rather lost young man. The film ads a rather lost young woman to the mix, and ties the stories together with an overarching redemption narrative. This later little bit is what I find most distasteful about the film, because redemption narratives on the whole are distasteful, but we don't really need to dwell on it, since I didn't realize the redemption narrative was there until around the fourth time watching the film. The rest of the film is far too charming to notice anything like a defective plot. (I should note, that this leads me to conclude that the collection of short stories might be the perfect adaptation material for a film).

The plot, as I mentioned, essentially circles around a lost young man, and his girlfriend who gets him addicted to heroin. The young man is called FH by most everyone, which stands for F#$khead, he also has a strangely in depth knowledge of theology. The woman is a heroin addict, and that's about it.

The reason why I don't classify this film as being about love, is that the female character is not really a character, she's a metaphor for something. In the film she really serves as a focal point for the main character's overwhelming passion for everything worldly and dying (the same thing...). Everything she does in the film is physical, dancing, ripping his clothes off, doing heroin, punching him (it helps considerably that Samantha Morton is a wonderful physical actress who can't deliver lines worth a damn). One of the most telling scenes is when he hallucinates her into a drive in movie (in Carnival of Souls to be specific), her actions are like lights projected, which he is simply happy to watch.

She dies of course, as things have a tendency to do. A lot of things in this movie to be exact, at least 3 humans, and a whole lot of baby rabbits. The attitude towards death in this movie is summarized by a minor character later in the film who the main character has a relationship with. Every one of her husbands, every person she has ever loved, has died in some sort of strange situation, from this she has come to see herself as lucky to be alive, and to value every moment of life. When she is having sex she raises her hands to the heavens as though she is in church.

The "value" of life is further brought home by the strange and beautiful moments that are scattered throughout the film: The flying naked woman, the man who comes into the hospital with a knife in his eye, the hallucinations at the drive in movie, seeing Jesus' heart inside a drug dealer, the interactions with the Mennonites, and ultimately the young man's total absorption with his girlfriend.

The relationship in the end though is not about love, and this film is not about redemption, or heroin. It is about the awe which one should have for the strange beauty of life.

Buy Jesus' Son the Book

Buy Jesus' Son the Movie

2007-03-06T04:22:00.000+01:00

I don't know what's wrong with the producers of the DVD for The Asphault Jungle that they couldn't use anyone better than Drew Casper to do the voice commentary on the film. This is a film I like very much, and something of a classic in the John Huston Canon, there is no real point in hearing Drew Casper talk about it though, so I'd like to be on the record saying that they need a different voice commentator.

The film is a film about women masquerading as a crime film. All of the main characters have certain "issues" with women. From Dix's complete ignorance that they exist (while a woman is aggressively after him), to Emmrich and Riedenschneider's obsession with women, to finally Cobby's overt homosexuality. Even the men who don't have "issues" with women, need money due to their responsibility to women (Ciavelli). The heist is only there to draw these characters together, and show how the common attachment relationship to women (or the idea of women), is something that defines each of these character's relationship to this venture that will eventually ruin them all.

That's also what's so lovely about Marilyn Monroe's little role in this movie. It is clear that the lawyer honestly loves his wife, but his relationship with Monroe is something unreasonable, something strange that he has no control over, similar to the professor's obsession with young women, and Dix's confusion when it comes to young women. Money is simply a matter of business for these people, There is a certain logic to money, but when you begin delving into the ways of a young woman then you are getting into the religious.

What's so lovely about this film, is every character is motivated to crime through a vague notion of the mystery of the almighty. That certain things make life worth living, and those things are inevitably mysterious.

Buy the Asphault Jungle here

2007-03-04T22:58:00.000+01:00

Besides being a great movie, Au Hasard Balthazar should be required viewing for everyone who ever wants to make films, because it shows just how much you can get away with if you have a reputation for being an art house director that draws crowds. Bresson was of course horribly popular at the time he made this, for aggressive auteurism (and catholicism), and this is remembered as one of his best movies (and I think it is better than Diary of a Country Priest, which is the first Bresson movie most people watch). Still, I don't think any American could ever get away with telling the backers for his film that he wants to make a slow paced movie about a donkey that is also a saint.

The movie is of course about more than a donkey, it follows the community of people that the donkey is associated with. Primarily an attractive young woman, and a man with a motorcycle who she has a thing for. The nasty interactions that the boy, girl, and various other members of the cast have for one another are countered with the donkey's animal desire for love and affection. The desire to be of service, to nuzzle up against someone, to be "with" someone. The woman and man clearly want the same thing, but there is something fundamentally standing in the way. Something keeping them from humanly connecting.

In the film the donkey's kind of animal idiocy borders between true idiocy and persistent victimhood, and a powerful christlike suffering that breaks through the barriers of indifference. The donkey is a conscious character that stands for what is authentically right, which no one else is able to face.

Human martyrs are a persistently dull subject for a film (and that includes you Jesus), what makes Balthazar such an interesting character is that he is not acting greater than human, he is acting fundamentally human, despite the fact he is an animal. The almost dialogue-less acting on the part of the actors accentuates their similarities in the basic animal needs of all creatures, human and non-human alike. One of which is the experience of "being with" someone.

While each Christian out there seems to interpret their theology different. I think what is so interesting about the best religious filmmakers (Bresson and Tarkovsky are the first to mind), is their accentuation of the physical aspect of the religious experience (see Solaris), not the mystery of the unseen, unknown, the life afterlife, but the mystery of the seen, the known, the life within life.

People are drawn to each other. There has been no psychologist that has been able to adequately explain why that is. Our love for the things of this earth is an issue for the theologists.

Buy Au Hasard Balthasar here

2007-03-03T22:10:00.000+01:00

Flower Island is one of my favorite films of the past 10 years, largely because it combines three subjects which are among my favorite subjects to see in films: surrealism, death and religion (no love unfortunately). It deals with these subjects subtly, there is no real message to the film, just an overwhelming feeling of the existence of mystery.

The film is about three women who are going through traumatic times in their life, traveling from a mountainous part of South Korea, to a warm island off the south seas. The island is something of a clear metaphor for death and something of a less clear metaphor for heaven. The woman who is dying of cancer stays on the island while the other two go back to land, and the only resident on the island is a woman who is referred to as an angel.

What makes the movie so fantastic is the little random things that are fundamental to the plot, essential to building a theme, but without any real meaning or sense to them. The best among these scenes is when the bus that is supposed to be driving the two women to the coast, drives them up into the mountains because the bus driver is going to his friend's funeral. Part of the charm in the scene is that the driver acts as though the situation entirely makes sense ("I couldn't drive you to the coast, because I am going to my friends funeral"), and with these little completely sensible moments of nonsense the film manages to make it seem not as though the film was about death/religion, but that death/religion somehow invades life at every point.

Through this slow buildup of theme, the film becomes something of a journey into the realm of death and back again. But it is a different type of death than we are normally used to. In this film death is not something to be feared, it is just a strange thing that happens. When you go from existing to being no more.

Buy Flower Island here

2007-03-02T23:21:00.000+01:00

First of all, we should note that Abbott & Costello are great, and that this was the first film of theirs that I saw. Because it was the first of their films I saw, I got a somewhat stilted impression of this films quality. While there are some nice routines in the film (particularly the shortened version of the who's on first routine and the mustard routine), the film is really particularly interesting for some of its lesser qualities.

It is clear in this movie that Universal did not see exactly how much money these two men would eventually make them (they were the largest box office draws during Hollywood's most successful years ever). So they pair these two nimwits with two other characters following a real story. While this was done in many of Abbott & Costello's films, this one is notable because it is clear that Abbott & Costello were not meant to be the main stars, the other actors were... and of course the other actors sucked.

Unless you watch a lot of Turner Classic Movies, someone who grew up after the golden age of hollywood might not realize how much complete junk Hollywood made in order to come up with one Casablanca. Especially at studios like Universal and Columbia, which had rather heavy budget constraints, the main concern was just to send out as many films as fast as you can, because people would watch damn near anything in those days (this is now true of TV). One Night in the Tropics, places the complete junk that Hollywood makes, next to their occasional moments of brilliance, and unfortunatly the film producers couldn't quite tell which is which.

If you haven't seen every Abbott & Costello film, then your life is missing something dear, I suggest this one highly, but perhaps you should start with The Noose Hangs High, or even Meet Frankenstein.

Buy One Night in the Tropics here

2007-03-02T00:11:00.000+01:00

One thing you have to admire about Steve McQueen movies, is how little they generally have to do with the original historical subject that they portray. While I'm not necessarily certain that makes the films better, it does give credence to the force of Steve McQueen's personality.

I should be more committal. This film turned an interesting portrait of a real life person, into schlock during approximately the last 20 minutes of the film. The rest of the film is quite nice. Despite the fact that Lavar Burton was just thrown in the film for the hell of it (McQueen liked him), and the guy who the story was based on said that the film did not in any way resemble his life, the story holds together largely because its a movie about McQueen's stage persona. The most enjoyable thing about the film is watching McQueen drive poorly (you can tell he's enjoying it a lot, and he still looks like he's driving poorly really well), and seeing him take everything in stride, like McQueen does in all of his other movies.

I suggest watching the film, but turning the movie off right after the big car chase scene (the bad guy drives off a building into the river, then press stop), it quickly degenerates into absurd cheesiness, that can only leave you feeling depressed about the last 20 minutes that McQueen gave us to remember him by.

Buy the Hunter here

2007-02-28T20:00:00.001+01:00

The last shot of Dracula is a somewhat perfect example of why one should watch as many b-horror films as one possibly can. The rest of it is nice too, but pales in comparison to the eerieness of the last shot.

The entire movie is creepy, though not in the way, for instance, the Exorcist is creepy. In Dracula the creepiness is on the level of the film itself.

To put it simply, the film is about a bunch of rich socialites who don't realize that they have walked onto the set of a horror movie, and who find the noticeably strange Count Dracula to be incredibly charming (as they did his cobweb covered manor). The film is full of slow posed shots and bad acting that seems brilliant in the context of the film. Everything in Dracula seems slightly slower than it should be. Unlike the horror films modern viewers are used to, where the normal people come in contact with the strange and dangerous, everything in Dracula is slightly out of place, everything is strange, and everything is dangerous. (this is a quite common trope in early vampire films, most notably Dreyer's Vampyr and Murneau's Nosferatu, in Dracula though, it is unclear whether this is being done on purpose).

The last shot of the film really sums up what is so beautiful about this film. Dracula has kidnapped the woman, who is now lying in a coffin in the basement of his mansion. The vampire hunter and the lover come downstairs, find the woman, find Dracula, and stake Dracula. The vampire hunter tells the lover to "get her out of here, I have to do something first," and the last shot of the film is the lover climbing the majestic stairs of the decrepit mansion's basement with the woman in his arms.

What I love about this ending is that first of all, Dracula is remarkably easy to kill. Second, the last shot looks more like he is taking her to the bedroom than that he is bringing her to safety. He seems like the vampire. Third, we never know whether she actually is okay, or whether she is a vampire or some crazy thing like that, and fourth WE NEVER SEE WHAT HAPPENS TO THE VAMPIRE HUNTER.

The vampire hunter literally gets out of the way so that the film can have a majestic looking closing shot. Not to mention a shot which semantically makes rather little sense in the context.

It is rather hard to determine what the director "meant" by this shot. I'm inclined to believe that he just thought it was a rather nice shot, and no one gave a damn whether films at Universal made any sense, but if we over-interpret the shot he could be doing something rather brilliant. He could be leaving attempting to maintain an open ending to the film, despite the fact open endings weren't allowed in Hollywood (meaning, that she could still be a vampire, and the vampire hunter could be up to something fishy), or he could be trying to derive a metaphoric ending where "high society" and vampires equal roughly the same thing.

The director is Tod Browning, so I see all of these options as entirely possible. What is definite is that this film plays with form more than most any Hollywood film would over the following 10 years.

Buy Dracula here

2007-02-27T23:55:00.000+01:00

Instead of this week's 'What is Cinema,' I posted an essay I wrote on the film Afterlife and its connection to atrocity photographs from the second World War. I wanted to post this right now because of the attention being given to Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and the implications of atrocity photographs from our most recent spectacle of horror. Though I must say that I rather doubt most people will have the patience to read it, so I will do a quicker review of Afterlife here.

Afterlife is about people, who after they die, are given the choice of one memory which will be the only memory they live with in the afterlife. Though ostensibly about a possible place people go after they die, the film is fairly openly about documentary theory. The director, Koreeda Hirokazu, is primarily a documentarist, and he has said that he started this film as a project to see how people would depict their experience of themselves to themselves. The film on the whole is rather sweet and leaves you feeling rather warm in the end, but it deals with some rather intense issues.

To put it simply, most of the men who have to choose the memory that they take to the Afterlife, were involved in the second world war, and while only one is enthusiastic enough about the war that it seems he might have chosen a memory from the situation, many other characters were obviously effected by the conflict - Including the man who had to live with a tremendous burden of guilt, and the staff person who died too young to really have a memory worth choosing.

The memories that are chosen mostly have to do with the experience of another person, or more importantly, the experience of being for another person. More than one of the memories involve a simple interaction of images from the individual to the loved one, back to the individual, the chosen memories always accentuate the fact that the person exists without asking the question who he or she is, what his or her personality is, only that the individual existed for another individual, in an experience vaguely relating to the experience of love.

Putting background presence of the war next to the foreground presence of "being together with someone," rather successfully shows how film can have the ability to bring out the qualities of each individual which are irrevocably good. While Koreeda plays with a number of different types of images which he understands as "dishonest," (including films which are supposed to be mysteriously taken from the time of the event), he seems to be convinced that film has a fundamentally positive effect on the understanding of the experience of living, as long as it is in the right hands.

Of course, the experience of living is not always positive... but for that you will have to read the essay.

Buy Afterlife here

2007-02-27T21:35:00.000+01:00

After Life:
Historical Knowledge and the After Life of the Photographic Image

“War, with its harvest of dead bodies, its immense destructiveness, its countless migrations, its concentration camps, and its atomic bombs, leaves far behind the creative art that aims at reconstituting it.”
-Andre Bazin “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation and the Newsreel”

When asked what the film After Life was about, not many people would explicitly attach the film to World War II, and even less to the more traumatic events of the pacific war, such as the Nanjing massacre or the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagaski. The film, at first glance, is about self-biography, and our relationships with people and society. Major historical events conspicuously influence the memories of the characters in the film, but even then the war is one among many events and little explicit mention is made of it. If one were to pay attention to the play with the nature of the image, or notice the reference to major issues of documentary filmmaking that are being dealt with (such as if you were earlier aware that the filmmaker primarily made documentaries), one might begin to tie the film in to a web of discourses that all inevitably return to the experience of World War II, and the limits it presents to representation. It does not take too much effort of association to read the film as a response to Hiroshima Mon Amour’s reference to “the horror of forgetting,” and even a connection with Schindler’s List is not far removed when it is pointed out that Schindler’s List “participates in the contested discourse of fiftieth-year commemorations marking the eventual surrender of survivor- (or veteran-) based memory to the vicissitudes of public history.”1 These are a few of the many discourses about the claims photography and film can make about representing a particular event that After Life takes part in. These issues are not only a major problem for the documentary, but also raise fundamental issues for the genre of the War film and possibly the entire filmic medium. Nevertheless, After Life operates differently than most other films made on these topics, because it is concerned not with the event itself, but the way the event presents itself through the construction of its participating subjects, and how the subject relates to these “defining moments” in their life.

More specifically, the issue After Life deals with is a two-fold question about the nature of the image. One aspect deals with the limits of representation, to what level a film is physically capable of presenting an event; the other with the ethics of representation, how the event and its participants are influenced positively or negatively by the recording. I wish to elaborate on both of these issues through the analysis of a particularly difficult image from the Nanjing massacre, which I have included in the appendix of this paper. In this photograph a smiling Japanese man stands over the bodies of several dead Chinese men with a sword in one hand and a severed head in the other. On the level of signification this photograph is an amazing example of the failure of symbolic intention. It is elaborately posed, and the man is happy to have his picture taken holding the severed head of his enemy, but from the point of view of anyone seeing the image at a later date the intention is completely separated from the effect. It is impossible for us to see what the photographer or the person photographed wanted us to see when viewing this picture. This estrangement from the image leads to either a re-contextualization of the image, depending on our emotional involvement in the event, or an indexical reading of the picture concentrating on the facticity of the event, as opposed to its symbolic purpose.2

Given the possibility of a non-symbolic reading of the image, it would seem that the image would be more historiographically meaningful. Putting aside symbolic re-contextualization for now, what does this photograph actually say about the event it depicts? First of all, in the context of the larger collection of photos of the Nanjing massacre it says that the event actually happened, which we should remember, was for a while a major issue in Japan.3 The image also shows that members of the Japanese military were comfortable enough committing this massacre that they would be willing to have their pictures taken, smiling, while in the act of slaughter, but beyond these two points the image does not say much. Furthermore the second fact creates more problems then it does answers. As opposed to clarifying the reasons for the historical event, this point leads to an epistemological black hole as it puts for a series of questions that are not only completely unanswerable within the context of this image, but challenge any sociological, psychological, historical, or even literary narrative we can create of this event. The reason being that the image indexically unifies four things that none of these narratives are comfortable unifying: modernity, community, slaughter, and pleasure. The image exposes the lack of simple answers to questions such as why these men were killed and why the Japanese man is taking part in the killing, and instead makes these basic historical questions dependent on answering the one question that borders on unanswerable, why is this man smiling?

The black hole at the center of this photograph’s historical enunciation intensifies a second fact involving the interpretive after life of the image. Whenever Nanjing is taken as a jumping off point for issues of political action, the interpretation of the event never lives up to the frighteningly illegible record of the event. One Chinese historian interpreted the event as “nothing but a major display and act of Japanese militarist bushido spirit during the early stage of the war,” while the international controversy over Japanese textbook revisions were due to the massacre being explained by “the Japanese troops suffered heavy losses. Aroused by this the Japanese troops massacred large numbers of Chinese Soldiers and civilians when Nanjing was taken, and received international criticism.”4 The photograph we have been discussing seems to lend credence to the racist view put forth by the Chinese historian as opposed to the simplistic rationalization put forth in the Japanese textbook revision or any compromise we can make between the two. Since this is not a historiographically viable answer, we are left to ask whether the photographic and filmic mediums are inherently deficient when asking questions about the motivation of an action which go beyond blaming it on the ‘nature’ of the perpetrators. Does the filmic image expose anything about the event besides its facticity, and the particular way the fact is utilized in different contexts?

Though I have been focusing on this one extreme case, the burgeoning Japanese documentary movement has been dealing with a number of issues involving the possibly problematic interactions between an individual and society and how one can justify oneself as an individual agent in a context where ones identity is constructed by an event. Some of these documentaries use subjects similarly on the outskirts of historical interpretability, such as Minoru Matsui’s Japanese Devils (Riben Guizi), and Kazuo Hara’s (in)famous documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Yuki Yukite Shingun) both dealing with Japanese war atrocities, as well Tatsuya Mori’s A and A2, dealing with the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Hirokazu Koreeda, the director of After Life, directed a number of documentaries on the loss of memory and our handling of the past, a subject less horrific than the ones mentioned above (in the common sense of the word at least), but no less subject to problems of representation. He made two films about dead husbands, one a documentary, and one a fiction film, and then directly prior to making After Life he made a film about an amnesiac. While After Life is a fiction film, Koreeda has stated more or less explicitly at points that the film is a statement on his concept of documentary ethics.5 In giving us these proscriptions though he is also laying the groundwork for understanding how the documentary can be used as historical documentation, and what the medium can provide that other historiographic forms cannot.

The premise of the film is quite simple: after people die, they spend a week with counselors, also dead, who help them pick a single memory which will stay with them eternally. That memory is then filmed, screened, and the person moves to an eternity that only consists of that one memory. The film follows eleven of the newly deceased, but also comes to involve the back-stories of a number of the councilors, who we learn are in that job because they never were able to choose a memory to take with them. The film was based on interviews with five hundred people, and the eleven newly deceased in the film are made up of a combination of actors reading prepared lines, actors ad-libbing, and non-actors telling their own stories. The stories were obviously chosen/written for a thematic purpose, because they inter-relate among themselves, and they relate as well to larger issues of the documentary that Koreeda specifies as an explicit concern. Two of the characters talk about Westernization, but they are separated by two generations and provide two different images of Westernization. The older depicts westernization in the context of her feeling of adventure, and the bonds this feeling made with her older brother, whereas the younger talks about Disneyland. The younger girl’s memory is depicted as mass produced when one of the councilors informs her that many girls have chosen the same event. The girl then changes her mind and chooses an event more personal. World War II is discussed in two contexts, one is a soldier who talks about how great being captured by the Americans was, the other is one of the councilors who died during the war. A man talks about his adventures in the red light district, a woman talks about being mistreated by men. Another woman’s favorite memory is in the sense of community directly following the Kanto Earthquake. In these stories we get multiple sides of the same event, World War II is either the main event of ones life, or the end of ones life, Westernization is either full of promise or meaningless, relationships are all multi-faceted (the man eventually chooses a memory with his family), the devastation of the earthquake ends up being happily remembered. At the same time community is vividly a part of every memory, though in one case by negation, a man who wants to forget the horrors of his life, and chooses a place he used to hide when he was a kid.

There are a number of peculiar facts about the representations of memory in this film. First of all, all the memories are surprisingly filmic, though they do not confine themselves to visual sensations. The Director mentions that when researching this film he found people’s most vivid memories were attached to sound, but he explained the attachment of other senses to the image by the example:

In After Life, the middle-aged guy who chose the city tram as his favorite memory recalls a wealth of experiences after he gets on the tram and listens to a tape of its sound. I think people recall images that are evoked by sounds, and recall sounds that are evoked by images.

Still, none of the memories in the film involved thoughts, there was no “he said he loved me” (this type of expression is in fact consciously avoided), instead there is a concentration on the fact of existence, and the proof of existence. About half the memories chosen concentrated on the sensual feeling of being alive, the man who chooses a memory from when he was a baby, the girl who chooses laying on her mother’s mothers lap and feeling the breeze, the old woman among the flowers, and more poignantly the man who talks about eating after he thought he was going to die.6 The other group of memories involved existing in relation to another. The two stories that this film ends up focusing on involve this type of memory. The man who makes a point about wanting proof of his existence and eventually chooses a memory of an inconspicuous day with his wife most clearly articulates this aspect of the memories, but this is also an part of the memories of the woman who discusses her relationship with her brother, the man who only talks about sex but eventually chooses his daughter’s marriage, and the girl who’s choice of memory is a lie about a rendezvous with a married man. This type of memory is involved in a different way in the sense of community the old woman remembers in the bamboo garden after the earthquake. Both the fact of existence, and the proof of existence in these two forms are concepts expressed best through the photographic medium’s concentration on ontology as opposed to epistimology. In After Life the ability to mummify time that has long been associated with the photographic medium, is a way for the dead to take pride in the past fact of physicality.

Another peculiarity is that there are three different types of image that lay claims on the object of memory, the memory itself, video footage of the actual event, and the event recreated as a film. Since the eventual goal of the characters in After Life is to recreate their most important memory on film, the implication is that the filmmaker is trying to say that these “recreations” hold a higher value than footage of the event or narrations from memory. This is one of the more difficult aspects of the film; it sets up two different way of depicting the event, through actuality footage and through memory narratives, and posits that neither of these two forms of depiction are as suitable for depicting the event as self-directed, filmed, re-enactments – and rather cheap ones at that. Koreeda gives some clue towards his reasoning for assessing this superiority, in regards to the superiority of the re-enactments over the actuality footage, he said:

The images from the video player are the opposite of that: they were images of real events, but you can't tell from whose perspective they are taken; images in which the subjects don't know they are being filmed. I included them in an attempt to show, "This is what I think a documentary is not." I wanted to include in that film a bold statement of my personal beliefs about documentary, that in order to become a documentary those kind of emotions and human relationships are necessary.

On the superiority of the re-enactments over the memory narratives:

I made those unrealistic fictions collide with the narratives, bringing out emotions that did not appear in the narratives, and details of memories that couldn't be talked about. That's what I personally wanted to get at. I also thought the facial expressions, the comments about memory, and the actions that came about after being filtered through those fictions made up a kind of documentary.

The first point is a basic media literacy point, since the memory re-enactments are made by the people they are about, the dignity of the subject is built into the image. The image of the person is within that person’s control, and a person cannot exploit him or herself. The second point is more counter-intuitive – he assesses the value of the re-made memories by saying that we understand more about the interior of the person through the remaking of the memory into film, than we do from his personal narrative. He does not bother to point out the paradox that his assertion is about a fundamentally exterior medium.

Here the film runs afoul of our previous interpretation of the photograph from the Nanjing massacre. The memory-films of After Life and this photograph, though different in many ways still have a number of similarities. While there is the significant difference of recording context, especially the fact that the characters in After Life knew the stakes of the images, and a difference in the narrative ability of film and photography, there are still similarities in the source of authorship, they are both self presented, the emotions of the depicted, all of whom seem pleased, and the indexical quality of the image, its source in reality. Merleau-Ponty implied in his essay “The Film and the New Psychology,” that an indexically depicted event

inherently depicted interiority of the subject:
If I try to study love or hate purely from inner observation, I will find very little to describe… (except physical feelings) which do not reveal the essence of love or hate. Each time I find something worth saying, it is because I have succeeded in studying it as a way of behaving… Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another’s consciousness: they are types of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside.7

If self-presented indexical images fundamentally reveal something of the interiority of the subject, it should do so in all cases, and in the Nanjing photo we are told nothing of the subjects interiority. How then can we unify this with the historiographic and aesthetic concepts of the film After Life? Or to keep a full sense of the stakes, if After Life is a film that is conceptually built on a notion of human dignity, how does it apply in a situation where human dignity is so aggressively and violently denied.

In Siegfried Kracauer’s early essay “Photography,” he discusses two different types of images of the deceased, the memory image, and the actuality image. The memory image is the image of the person that one links forever to their memory, recalling only “what has been perceived as true,” as opposed to the aspects of the person changed by time. He calls this type of image “the persons actual history,” and associates the memory image with an icon, or a painting where all the wrinkles have been removed. The actuality image is what we have been talking about thus far, images of a particular point in time that lose meaning as they age until they only depict their actuality and their historicity. Kracauer describes an interaction with a photograph of ‘grandmother’ that is disorienting because it is a photo of a woman that you have never seen before, who is wearing the strange clothes typically worn sixty years ago. He makes the point though, that our reaction to a photographic image as it becomes historical, can either be a dismissal of meaning of the facticity of history, or the disorienting of our memory image of the object. The ability to disrupt the ‘icon’ of a figure makes the historical realm a place of possibility not only in the realm of event meaning, but in the very realm of identity. The memory-films of After Life are an opportunity for the character to write his own memory image that in the after life will be his self-identity, or more explicitly, his only existence. Within these images we see the impact of the community on this individual, but the presentation of his self-memory image in the final screening room sends that image back out into the community, allowing him to justify himself not through explaining his actions, but through presenting his ideal-existence as actuality, presenting his self worth.8 Whether the memories are true or not – as one of them quite definitely isn’t – the films show how the maker relates himself to himself, or what he considers the fundamental character of his being, how he existed, or how he existed for someone. The fact that this is actuality footage, and in fact footage that exposes itself as an actuality due to its poor quality and the time distance between the event and the age of the actors, brings about an instability of the image that narration could never achieve. The character is in fact relating himself to the memory in the image, as opposed to performing the memory or seeing the actuality. What the above Merleau-Ponty quote implies is that the making of a relationship with oneself is inherently a performative act, thus cinematically visible.9

This analysis, while it does not give us any clue about what is psychologically going on in the photograph from the Nanjing massacre, it exposes a number of facets of the event itself. The man is posturing for the camera, and in doing so he is performing both for the people at the scene, the potential later viewers of the image, and also for himself. The performance for the first group is successful, the performance for the second group is a failure, and we do not know the conclusion of the self-performance. Whether or not this particular subject gave it a second thought (in those conditions it was surely a possibility that he died before he had the chance to give it a thought) this was a mass phenomenon, and thus extendable to any number of people on the Japanese front lines. After Life gives a hint at how such a figure would fit into the film’s conceptual schema with the man who “did such horrible things” that he can never mention them. Those horrible things constitute a defect on his conception of self that is so great he considers the ability to erase those memories “heaven.” The memories constitute a figurative erasure of (ideal) self, which he wishes he could turn into a literal erasure. Eventually he is done one better by being given a chance to restore ideal self. The man in the Nanjing photograph had no such opportunity, and will be forever known to history only through the inscrutable black hole of his smile. In Kracauer’s terms, the man’s history is the Nanjing massacre. The abolition of ideal self that we see vividly depicted in this image denies any simple psychology or sociology, and by relation any simple assigning of guilt. The fact that his pleasure in killing is an effect of a major historical event that takes part in an elaborate chain of historical cause and effect makes questions of guilt and innocence become either absurd, as in the racist assertion I earlier mentioned this photograph supported, or meaningless in that it supposes mass guilt, or mass innocence.10 The reading of this event in the way proscribed by After Life can only lead to a very concrete expression of the horror of annihilation. The photograph contains a subject that refuses not only a concept of ideal self, but a self at all, it is an ontological representation of hell that sucks us all into it.

I don’t mean by this essay to imply that a group psychology study of the Nanjing Massacre is doomed to failure, I have actually found a few examples of similar researches on the abolition of personality that were strikingly successful.11 I meant instead to show that this particular historical method, which has become a major focus of the Japanese documentary movement, makes strikingly clear the impossibility of positivist assertions of guilt to particular agents within communal actions. What this method draws out is the stakes of a particular historical decision. This photograph is far from singular, such images come out of almost any war which a camera takes part in. And while the situations are largely different, the fact that the semantic qualities of certain images from Abu Gharib are exactly the same as the one I have been discussing should give anyone pause. This method does not concern itself with the reasons one does or does not go to war, simply with the fact that the stakes are higher than anything that can possibly be explained in words.

1 Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22:2, Chicago: University of Chicago, Winter 1996. Schindler’s List was made in 1993, After Life in 1997.
2 A photograph with a completely opposite effect of signification is Barthes example in Mythologies of the photograph of the Black soldier saluting the French flag. While one can agree or disagree with the symbolism it is presenting, indexically it is meaningless because the event it portrays is the capturing of the photograph.
3 For a discussion of this see: Daqing Yang, “The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan,” Perilous Memories, Ed. E. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, Lisa Yoneyama, Durham: Duke University, 2001.
4 Yang 73, 63.
5 See for example his interview in Documentary Box, #13, Yamagata: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Apr. 1999. (all quotes from Koreeda in this paper are taken from this interview)
6 Though it is not clear whether this is the memory he chooses.
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” Sense and Nonsense, Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia Aleen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern, 1964. Merleau-Ponty of course is differentiating film and photography, because of films narrative capabilities. Still the point has implications for photography.
8 One might read this aspect of an ideal community as the primary reason for the councilor’s final choice of memory.
9 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” The Mass Ornament, Trans./Ed. Thomas Levin, Cambridge: Harvard, 1995.
10 I am not speaking of the massacre itself, where notions of guilt are complex but need to be dealt with. I am speaking of the soldier’s enthusiastic participation in the massacre, which must be dealt with on a very different level from questions of guilt and innocence.
11 The previously mentioned A and A2 documentaries are good examples, but more striking is Patricia Steinhoff’s essay “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: The Social Dynamics of the Rengo Sekigun Purge,” Japanese Social Organization, Ed. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1992.

2007-02-27T00:58:00.000+01:00

Platform is the second movie of Jia Zhang-Ke, who in my opinion is one of the most talented directors coming out of a region that produces more interesting films than any other region in the world at the moment.

One should know when entering this film that its quite long, with no real plot. The film consists of a number of short scenes in the life of a performance group from the Chinese countryside as the country exits communism and enters the market economy. Characters enter and exit the group, but the group slowly disintegrates as the country loses any need for "culture building," and Westernization and the market economy begin to determine what is necessary for the group to do in order to make a living.

There are a lot of issues one could take with the content of this film. The first of which is the way Jia Zhang-Ke depicts westernizations effects on the countryside. He treats the characters fascination with the west largely as comedy, and with a strange nostalgia for communism. While the nostalgia isn't strange in itself, as that feeling is fairly common in ex-communist countries, it is rather strange in this film where he is fairly explicitly criticizing at some points the role of the party in daily life.

The film really encourages you to pay as little attention to the plot as you possibly can. It is fairly easy to lose track of who's who in this film, and I would prefer to think of some of the attitudes depicted in the film as ambivalent rather than contradictory. What the film does in its three hours of scenes without a linear plot, is slowly move the viewer away from watching a film about performers, to watching a film about people. All of the people though, are nagged by a desire to performs. In a clichéd western film though, this would have been a desire for fame and the spotlight. In Platform the characters, who could never imagine performing in these shitty villages as anything vaguely resembling fame, are really desiring performance in itself. Performance though, is something rather more than

Lets take two shots as an example.

In one scene a girl, an ex-performer, is alone, sweeping the police station where she works. As the scene slowly progresses she goes from sweeping to dancing.

In the last scene of the film, a woman holds a baby and does housework while a tea kettle comes to a boil.

Of course, if the scenes are taken literally, then both women (actors) are performing. One is turning the performance of real life in to a stage performance, the other is performing real life, but both of them are performing for us. Performance is a way, for the original group of communist performers, of being for others, that slowly disintegrates into being for oneself. The film is similarly a way of being for others, and as the "performances" go downhill, the authenticity of the way the characters present themselves (are presented) to the audience is always more deeply foregrounded. Until the characters are literally performing their way of being.

Of course then the film ends, and there is nothing at all.

Buy Platform here

2007-02-25T21:05:00.000+01:00

I was actually not horribly impressed by La Strada when I first watched it. André Bazin wrote a really nice essay about it though, which featured prominently in my master's thesis. I wouldn't make it the first Fellini film you watch (that would be La Dolce Vita), but it is something well worthwhile.

The film centers on a "slow" girl, who is sent to be the wife/employee of a traveling performer (a strong man). The traveling performer treats her horribly. She meets an acrobat who treats her well, he tries to convince her to leave the strong man, but she won't. The strong man accidentally kills the acrobat, the girl goes crazy, he leaves her, he finds out later that she dies, he is left alone on a beach.

What Bazin essentially argues is that given the general attitude of the strong man throughout the film, there is no reason for him to feel remorse, it is not in his character to feel sorry for how he has hurt someone. What he feels instead is the visible absence of the fullness of the girls character. The way she deals with space, the way she understands things, enlivens the world, and now the world that she has created is gone.

If you read more of my posts about love, you'll note that my basic argument about love in cinema is about cinemas ability to show two "worlds" interacting. Not just two basic sets of beliefs and prejudices (that's the stuff of bad romantic comedy), but the actual physical way specific individuals orient themselves in the world. A good love story is about the confusion one faces when one is fascinated by the way another persons moves through space. Then we as the audience are fascinated by the both of them (its love all around).

Both the girl and the acrobat in La Strada, do not just move through space, they float (the acrobat literally). They have a way of livening up any space they enter, despite the fact that they both lack anything that could be commonly understood as an intellect. They could be, and are, beautiful together, but in the girl's understanding her 'way of being' is intertwined with the strong man's. The strong man does not think of her like that. He thinks about her as any other person, someone with utility, but someone who can't get in the way of his survival.

At the last moment it is obvious that, her way of being was intertwined with his, that she was in a very real sense a part of him, and a part of how he oriented himself to the world. With her death the world is palpably 'missing something.'

buy La Strada here

2007-02-24T16:28:00.000+01:00

The Bourne Supremacy is in my opinion much worse than the Bourne Identity. The reasons are fairly simple, essentially the Bourne Supremacy took all of the strengths of the Bourne Identity and toned them down in order to make the film more Hollywoody.

To start with, the film begins in Asia, and the film directors quite obviously had a harder time making Asia feel how Asia actually feels to live in, then they did making Europe feel like Europe. They immediately kill off Franka Potente, who was in my opinion one of the main strengths of the first film. The moral tone gets really overwhelming towards the end, and the extended chase scene is much worse choreographed than the numerous fight scenes. Also the women were far too sympathetic in this film. Good and evil should be gender balanced in any progressive society.

On the other hand, the choreography in most of the film was quite high quality, and it did have a similar feeling of shadiness to the original. On the whole I enjoyed watching this film, and I considered it an above average action film, but unfortunately there was more than one occasion where I had to roll my eyes.

buy the Bourne Supremacy here

2007-02-23T20:44:00.000+01:00

So, I missed a days post because I've been working for approximately 24 hours (well to be honest I went out to a very expensive restaurant with a banker, which counts as work in my job)

I am jealous of whoever it was who came up with this idea for a film. I know of course that this was a book before it was a film, but anyone with a bit of common sense I'm sure knows that the book was written in order to be made into a film. The film is a rather typical model of a "good" action film. A film where a kind of shadey character, faces a whole lot of other shadey characters, and while there is a kind of play at a moral, though no one really takes the moral seriously, mostly they pay attention to the excellent choreography. That efficiently sums up every Luc Besson movie, the Die Hard series, and this film, all of which happen to be my favorite (western) action films ever made (though Luc Besson happens to have made a lot of shit in his time, he is forgiven everything because he made The Fifth Element and Nikita).

The Bourne Identity does all of these things, and the only reason it does not compare to the better Luc Besson films and the Die Hard films is because the main character really isn't shadey enough... though he is working against the government, so we'll say he's half way there. Matt Damon does a rather good job playing the character who is supposed to look clean cut, but really not. The violence in the film is well choreographed to the point of art. The film just does too much to find a moral reason for the violence.

The other reason I like this film is Franka Potente. Though I know that she was essentially chosen for this part because she looks German and she was in Run Lola Run, I think she adds something to the film, that a lesser Hollywood film would have missed (because they would have chosen someone like Nicole Kidman to play the part). What this film really has, that I think would classify it as an advancement in International Spy thrillers, is that the film actually feels like Europe. The film doesn't feel like Europe in the same way that a Meg Ryan movie that shows the Eiffel Tower every 5 minutes feels like Europe. The film feels like walking down a street in an average town in Germany, you don't see Europe in the way a tourist would, but you feel like you see it from the point of view of an average German woman (despite the fact she was in a film that was popular in America), and an American who works in the world of international politics. (Compare this film to "Casino Royale," which is quite definatly Europe from the point of view of a tourist).

The violence (or in more common parlance, "fight scenes") were really quite nice. What is really necessary to choreograph a good action film is a strong feeling for space, which the director of this film obviously had. A good violent segment should have the feeling of cleverly navigating a complex space, and the scene at the embassy was especially noticable in that regard (though that was a major aspect of every action sequence in the film.

I mean, to put it simply this film combined Europe with violence, which in my opinion is a winning combination, especially if you take out heroics... They bordered on a complete removal of heroics, but eventually left enough for those people that need a moral justification for violence.

Moral justifications for violence are horrific things. We should never excuse violence in real life, and any moral justification of violence is essentially immoral. In film we should understand that violence is only there for the beauty of it all, and that is enough of an excuse in itself.

Tom Stoppard is writing the script for the third one, figure that one out.

Buy the Borne Identity here

2007-02-21T22:47:00.000+01:00

I decided to review Breathless today, after noticing that most people who found my site on a search engine, found it through my review of Contempt. While Contempt comes across as being the far more interesting movie on first glance, I could talk for hours about Breathless.... but I'll try and make it shorter than that.

Breathless is Godard's first major film, and set off something of an earthquake in the world of cinema. Both technically and in its attitude the film is unprecedented, to the extent that we can say the title of the film refers to both the style it was shot in, and the actions of the character.

Technically, it does not seem as groundbreaking at first glance as it really is, but I think it is clear on close glance that few movies can really duplicate what Godard is doing in this film (and most of those movies are also made by Godard). He said that a goal of his while making this film was to give the impression that editing had just been invented. The editing, while looking 'wrong' to anyone who is used to standard classical editing styles, is strangely compelling. Time speeds up or slows down depending on the attitudes of the characters, you are given the impression of an event instead of the reconstruction of an event (by which I mean, there is a lot of jump cutting).

Besides giving the overall impression that the characters really are breathless, this plays into the real purpose of the film, it's kind of explosion into the real world (a more "academicy" term would be the destruction of textuality). The film is famous for being the first film that was intensely self referential (I'm sure some of you dorks out there are thinking about Melies and the cinema of attractions, but we both know that's something different), the main character regularly talks to the camera when he is alone, and he is also obsessed with cinema (primarily Humphrey Bogart). Meaning that the audience is in the film (the main character talks to us), and the main character is outside of the film (he is a film spectator). The barrier between the artistic creation and real life is effectively broken.

Of course, this is taking the standard reading of the film a bit farther than most people would care to take it (the standard reading is that reflexivity is used to comment on the impact of film/ideology on the characters life, which I would argue is true of Terrance Malick's Badlands, but not true here). The reason why I would argue that this is a merging of fact and fiction, and not just a formalist/Brechtian technique used to move from entertainment into "issues," is because it is clear from later films of Godard's (particularly Bande a Part, and Pierrot Le Fou), that 'the world of cinema' was a positive thing for Godard at this time (though he would change his mind in the 70s, I've heard a number of arguments that he changed his mind back in the 80s). The world of film is, in Breathless, a world of possibility, where running from the police, pregnancy, and even death, are not big enough threats to keep two lovers from going on an adventure together, one where they are always a step ahead of the cops, until they betray each other.

I regularly argue that all film is about love, and it is films like Breathless that make me argue this. Brecht said, quite famously, that "food is the first thing, morals follow after." In cinema love is the first thing. Love simply defined as an irrational sense of wonder when faced with another human being, that arouses the desire within oneself to perform feats of magic. That I think is the simplest definition of love, and explains the whole experience of cinema, from concept to spectatorship better than any other explanation. Under this definition Godard has always been the best filmmaker in dealing with issues of love, and this is where he got his start.

Buy Breathless here

2007-02-21T07:46:00.000+01:00

So... Macunaima is another movie that is not available in America, and so I doubt many of my readers will take the time to find it, but if you have had the chance to see this movie and missed it, then I would hope after reading this review you'll be disappointed to near the point of suicide.

Macunaima is a surrealist comedy and like all surrealist comedies there's very little purpose describing the point. Since this comedy has a 'point' though I should loosely describe the film:

A woman in the jungle gives birth to a baby (played by a full grown man), after growing up and the mother dying, the boy, his father and his brother go to the city, but on the way they run into a magic spring that turns Macunaima white (and handsome). When they get to the city they run into a terrorist revolutionary woman, who Macunaima has wild sex with, until she is accidentally blown up by her own bomb.... that's the first 20 minutes of the movie, you should get the point by now (though i should mention that there are cannibals later on).

The film is based on a book, and the filmmaker had said that he could not get his head around the story until he heard that the author described the film as being about "a man who is swallowed by his country." This comes across clearly in the movie. When a political soap box preacher is talking about the plagues of Brazil as debauchery, theft, and left wing politicians,
Macunaima pushes him off the box, and starts saying "this man is crazy! the plagues of Brazil are Tuberculosis, Cholera and too many ants!" The rich literally eat the poor, whiteness is his ticket everywhere. And while, Macunaima consistently outsmarts all the people who are after him without even trying (he's mostly concerned with sex), he ends up being swallowed by the jungle in the end.

People might be falsely thinking at this point that the film has some sort of sense to it, but really all of the things I just described are "feelings" to the movie. The progression of the plot is complete and utter nonsense, which is whats so great about the movie. If surrealism is about the physical manifestation of desire, this film is about the constant battles between desire and the forces of society, where desire, and the human, can only win through total absurdity.

I don't think anyone's killing themselves over that review.... I'll try harder next time.

2007-02-19T21:56:00.000+01:00

Though there are a lot of reasons to watch La Jetée, (it's a good movie), this is one of the few times where it can legitimately be said that the film is worth watching for the sake of a single shot.

The shot is simple. It is a shot of a woman who is lying in bed, she is lying still, and only lightly breathing. What makes the shot stand out, is that it is the only shot in the entire movie that is moving; besides this shot La Jetée is composed entirely of still photographs, and when you come to this shot the movement is barely visible. You have to strain to tell whether the woman is actually moving or you just imagined it.

The point of La Jetée is in this one shot. The sterility of the future world, the impending death of the main character, and the idea of falling in love with a living world. This one image, more then any other cinematic image I have ever seen, leaves you with the overwhelming impression of life.

2007-02-19T20:31:00.000+01:00

Slowly slowly, she walked up, to the place where he was lying, and as she pulled the curtain back she said "young man, I think you're dying."
- Barbara Allen, Anglo-American Folk song

In films, men are always far more mortal than women.

In Confessions of a Mask, Yukio Mishima's novel/confession, about discovering and hiding his homosexuality while growing up in wartime Japan, Mishima does something that would be shunned by most any other writer. He describes his sexual fantasies of men, as primarily fantasies of violence, of men dying or being injured. At the end of the book he describes looking at a young gang member, who is shirtless, laughing with some girls. Mishima describes images of the man getting stabbed in a fight, the blood seeping from his stomach, all which flashed through his head in a moment of desire.

The context of this passage makes it easy to dismiss, a fictional story of a disturbed homosexual youth, written by a disturbed homosexual man (he was 30 at the time of writing it, he would commit ritual suicide at 45), if we watch enough movies though the link between death and the male body is rather hard to avoid. Films that specifically attempt to eroticize men, always eroticize them being hurt in some way, from Son of the Sheik, where a major scene in the middle merely involved Valentino being whipped, to the new James Bond film Casino Royale, which combined a more sexualized bond that "made all the women gasp," (to quote Barbara Broccoli), with him being tied up naked and hit repeatedly in the testicles. Even if male sex appeal is not accentuated, it is hard to get away from the fact that a man's primary characteristic in a film is that he is in the process of dying. "Male" genres always focus on pain being done to the body, on the destruction of the body, in war, or in nature, or in gang fights. Put simply, it borders on a rarity to find a film where a male is a primary character, treated with respect, and not either hurt or dying.

Taking a cue from feminist criticism I should probably talk about the association of men with death as something bad, and I do think the fact that people are much more ready to see men in pain than women is disturbing. I don't think I would be true to my site though if I were to say the association of men with death was something necessarily bad.

I argue in a number of places on this site, that film as a medium is about death - an argument I took from Barthes, who stole the argument from Bazin (Bazin argues that film is something like an afterlife, which I agree with. Barthes argues that film is about death, which is more to the point, but not as exciting an argument). As a medium that is about death, it helps us put in perspective the true value of our life, and all of the things that are inexorably lost when we are lost.

In City Lights, Chaplin puts all his heart into giving a woman a second lease on life, but as she revives he slowly wastes away under the murderous pressure of society. Her recognition of him in the end lets her see herself, because he reflects the darkness she was in, and the light he opened for her.

In 24 Hour Party People, a generally obnoxious main character is counterpointed by a beautiful and suicidal man. All the post-modern nonsense seems frivolous when set next to the steady shots of a man thinking about dying. The film becomes dull after Curtis is gone, because it doesn't seem like the main characters got the point.

One could go on forever listing these specific cases, or one can simply describe the erotics of the male body... as a sense of urgency...

2007-02-18T23:59:00.000+01:00

I saw Martin at the 2006 Karlovy Vary film festival, and I must say that its rare that I see a film that I enjoy so much.

First of all, it should be noted that this film is a b-horror film, though there is little horror in the entire movie. We can call it b-horror without worries, essentially because it is quite funny, and it has vampires in it (kinda). The plot centers on a young man who claims to be a vampire. He gets sent off to live with his uncle, because he's been causing too many problems for his parents (he occasionally has to kill people for their blood). It seems his entire family says he is a vampire as well, and he occasionally has flashbacks to a very typical, "vampire being run out of eastern european town" situation. He has one cousin who thinks the whole thing is ridiculous and that her family just has this poor kid convinced that he is a vampire. It is never really clarified whether he is a vampire or just a confused kid, though he acts like a confused kid all the time. The murders are beautifully choreographed, and the acting is wonderful (you actually believe he isn't going to kill her when he says he isn't going to kill her). You always feel sorry for the poor vampire boy, even though he is regularly murdering people.

The last thing I like about the film is the ending is wonderful.

So, a nice genre mix of a b-horror film and a coming of age film, brilliantly directed, and fun to watch. I can't suggest it highly enough.

Buy Martin here

2007-02-17T09:24:00.000+01:00

I like to think of Night of the Living Dead as something approaching the ideal film... if the ideal film had zombies in it. Because of this film, and the Kingdom, I am tempted to believe that the ideal film does have Zombies in it.

This is the most famous film by the legendary George Romero, and might be the most famous b-horror film of all time. The plot is rather simple... there are zombies, and there are people, people want to stop zombies, zombies want to eat people (mainly their delicious brains).

One should remember that a b-horror movie is very different from a horror movie, or a slasher film (I'm misusing terminology here). While a slasher film is about giving you shocks (any Halloween), and a horror film actually frightens you (the exorcist), a b-horror is meant not to be taken seriously in the least. A b-horror uses certain conventions either for the purpose of humor (most cannibal films) or conceptual play (Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn't very funny, but it was quite definitely about Communism), more often then not the aim is a bit of comedy and a bit of conceptual play.

I think when that is pointed out, the conceptual play should be fairly obvious (mobs of un-thinking people going after the few with their brains intact... the main one happens to be black... the film is made in 1968 if that helps you), and the humor should be pretty obvious (zombies are by nature funny), what really makes this film stand out from all the other b-horror films is a few moments of directorial genius. Though I shouldn't go into detail, the way he introduces the zombies is beautiful, and the ending has aspects of a Shakespearian tragedy (the only other film I usually say that about is Lawrence of Arabia, and I honestly wonder what David Lean would think about being put in a category with Night of the Living Dead).

I'm guessing my readers are not sure whether to take me seriously or not at this point, but I would encourage people to take my Shakespeare comparison as far as possible (unless you take Shakespeare too seriously). Shakespeare had a certain obsession with theatrical structure, the beginning, middle and end of a story that can all be wrapped up in a predictable amount of time, took on beautiful dimensions to him, and he constantly loved to make metaphors based on it ("who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard from no more"). The real components of a Shakespearean tragedy is the inevitability of it, and the fundamental feature of tragedy, both Shakespearean and Greek, is an overwhelming feeling of waste.

Conceptually, Night of the Living Dead is doing a lot with these ideas, and its doing so beautifully. The ending of the film is inevitable in the same way the ending of our film is inevitable. We either get swallowed by society, or we simply die.

If you don't like that reading of the film, just watch it for the zombies and you won't be disappointed (I freakin' love zombies).

Buy Night of the Living Dead here

2007-02-17T00:22:00.000+01:00

I wanted to make a post on Before Sunset today, as a follow up to yesterday's post. I don't know if I really have anything to add to yesterday's post though.

I think Before Sunset suffered from the exact same problems as Before Sunrise (the entire film was made up of tacky dialog), and had the same advantages (actually a bit more, since Julie Delpy is quite a bit better looking in this one). What really made this film stand out though, besides the better camera work, is the last 10 seconds of the film. I honestly think that the end of this movie made both mediocre films worth watching.

Of course I don't want to add any spoilers....... but I'll leave it to be said that there is something to being with someone and not saying anything that is rather important. The right combination of the light on someone you find beautiful, and the right words, or lack of, or that meaningless chatter that is supposed to hide something else. Time passes relentlessly, and destroys everything worthwhile. Even though cinema can wither away over time, it can arrest the beauty of light for a few years, in order to remind future generations that something good happened in the past.

My girlfriend is sleeping in the bed next to my desk. I should end this post.

Buy Before Sunset here

2007-02-15T21:53:00.000+01:00

People really talk too much in Before Sunrise, and it ruins the entire film. Which is too bad, because I really want to like this film (mainly because I have a crush on Julie Delpy left over from White), but everyone in the film is constantly chattering about complete crap.

The romance is rather poorly contrived as well, the filmmaker - Richard Linklater - seems to have decided that he needed to differentiate the characters enough to establish the fact that they have different personalities, and of course that French and American people are different, but one can't help but wondering what they like about each other (this gets more accentuated in the sequal, where there's a lot of talking about how passionate they are about one another).

There are a few nice things in the film though, primarily a short conversation towards the beginning about a TV show one of the characters though up, that is an adaptation of André Bazin's concept of total cinema. To sum up Bazin's concept, he argued that humans have a desire to create as deep a relationship between cinema and their lived experience of the world, as humanly possible (the arguement is in itself a bit tricky, because he is not arguing that cinema should be "realistic" he is arguing that it should have a relationship to reality, which are two entirely different things). The main character in Before Sunrise, talks about a TV show where you just follow an individual for 24 hours, every day a different individual, and show everything. The thought being that if you didn't edit it, then you could not help but really see the person in all his or her strengths and weaknesses (There is actually more of Vertov in that idea than Bazin, but there is little doubt that the director is thinking about Bazin, given that Bazin comes up in Waking Life, another Linklater film).

I find the idea of the TV show vaguely pleasant, in the same way I find the idea of Vertov pleasant (and amateur pornography). I get the impression Linklater thought that this TV show was something like what he was trying to do, unfortunately the phoniness of the dialog seeps through at every moment of the film.

The only reason I would suggest seeing this film is because I think Before Sunset is worth watching, I'm also hoping that I could ask Julie Delpy for a date one day, and I don't want to be on the record saying any of her movies are crap.

Update: I discovered this post the day after I wrote my post. Though obviously we disagree on most things, it seems Julie Delpy can really do something to a film.

Buy Before Sunrise here

2007-02-14T19:59:00.000+01:00

Histoire De Detective, is almost a perfect surrealist comedy, mainly because I am never entirely sure whether it is a comedy.

This is a silent film from the twenties, though it really wouldn't fit F.W. Murneau's conception of a film. As opposed to the general trend in cinema of the time away from inter-titles, this film has a title after every shot, "explaining" the shot. Explaining is a rather mediocre word though, because the explanations are only vaguely related to what you see on screen. The film is really an illustrated story...

Which is really the point. The film is about a detective, who uncovers mysteries through the use of cinema. In this "case" he is following a man whose wife thinks there's something wrong with him. The film contrasts the man's random wanderings around Europe, where he doesn't really seem to do anything, and the woman's office life, where she seems to be answering the phone all the time. The film contrasts the modern woman, with the man running around beaches, and sitting on stone bridges, but then comes to the conclusion that there is nothing strange about the man, he is actually a genius. Why? Because he decides to build a SEAWALL! (by which I assume is meant a hydro-electric plant).

I'm assuming any sensible person will now be asking what the hell I'm talking about... which is good, because I got that exact impression while watching the film. I can't recreate the effect of the subtitles, but the timing was hilarious. It was the type of film where at moments you think, "of course he's not going to Amsterdam, he's going to Luxembourg!!! How could he possibly be going to Amsterdam," while you have no clue why you're thinking that.

The convoluted logic of this whole film left my laughing continuously, and I was pleasantly sucked in to the play with futurist themes (I liked the girl too, but I seem to have that feeling about most women from the twenties).

I would suggest this movie to anyone who would like to know what surrealism is, or what comedy is.... unfortunately I don't think its available on DVD.... so I guess you're out of luck.

2007-02-13T20:51:00.000+01:00

This film, of course, defined the term "the It girl," and is because of that Clara Bow's most famous film. While I suppose if you only see one Clara Bow movie this should be the one you see, there's something incredibly wrong with you if you think it is acceptable to just see one Clara Bow movie. It will have done its job if it just convinces you of that, though on the whole Mantrap, or The Plastic Age are better films.

The plot of the film is a rather standard Clara Bow plot (which can be all summed up by "girl falls in love, girl does zany things to get the guy"). In the film, some rich guy's foppish friend (they weren't gay until the 1950s) reads this story about having "It," a pretentious word for sex appeal. There are long discussions about who actually has "it," until the foppish guy decides that a certain girl working in the rich man's store, quite defiantly has it. He takes her out to a fancy dinner, and she goes after his not foppish friend. Since she is poor and he is rich there are endless problems, all of which Clara Bow manages to overcome with her Itiness. She of course gets the man in the end.

Though, this does not describe the actual reason you watch the film, which can be summed up as "Clara Bow is cute, look at all the things she can do!" I am completely mad about Bow, it is really quite difficult for one to avoid falling in love with her. I was not too charmed by her in the first shot (despite the fact that she was holding lingerie), but when she leaves the store in this cute little 1920's dress, and a cloche hat, I don't know if I've ever seen anything better in this world.

The film is filled with sexual puns, her dress is blown up by one of those sidewalk wind things a la Marylin Monroe, after she slaps a guy for being "too fast," she runs up stairs smiling and slaps a stuffed animal on the butt. There is also a lot of talk about unmarried pregnancy, and "kept" women. In this sense, one of the most interesting things about Clara Bow films is the way they counter her out of control sex appeal, with the reminants of victorian culture that was being cast off at the time. There is sex everywhere in her films, but the films stop just short of any impropriety (occasionally by condemning the sex that is there to please the audience).

I will stop at that mention though. A Clara Bow film shouldn't be overly analyzed, one should merely watch the film for the quickening pace of your heart, that the flash of her eyes inspires.

2007-02-12T22:04:00.000+01:00

I would really like to like this film, but I don't. From watching this film you get the impression that Wim Wenders loves cinema, and would like to express what he loves about cinema, but is incapable of expressing this feeling because he does not know how to use the medium. Also he has certain pretentions that do not serve his content.

The basic storyline has obvious references to cinema. Angels wander around Berlin, watching people, and hearing their thoughts, helping them through spiritual uplift despite the fact that they cannot be seen. The thoughts of everyone in the film are unusually poetic, but that is inevitable in this type of movie. The angels though cannot feel anything unless they give up their "angelness." One angel falls in love (with a trapeeze artist), and decides to give up being an angel so he can pursue the woman he loves. Then the film ends with them falling in love at first sight.

By this description of the film you should be able to see both the strong points of the movie, and its ridiculous points. First of all, the angels are clearly film spectators, they watch people but cannot feel anything, they know the person's thoughts, they have the inevitable affection for people that one gets from watching cinema, but the characters have to give up cinema for the real life, which of course is not a neccesity of real cinema. The love affair is poorly developed, and it seems that his affection for her, is an affection for what he gave up to go after her.

While I totally support incomplete metaphors, the metaphors in the film seem complete, but bad. The ambivalence towards the experience of watching film seems like a hackneyed counter-positioning of experience and knowledge, which does poor credit to the interaction of experience and knowledge.

There might be a defensive arguement that the angel only really experiences life because he was first a cinema viewer, but it would take a lot of work to come to that conclusion, and I get the impression that Wenders doesn't really care if we get that far.

2007-02-12T14:52:00.001+01:00

Once, several years ago, I had a conversation with one of my best friends on the existence of ghosts. He was at the time dating a girl who had a crazy streak in her, and who tended to believe in everything supernatural. My friend liked discussing the ideas with people, and around one in the morning at an all night donut shop we began talking about it.

The general conclusion we came to is that, like most religious beliefs, there is absolutely no rational reason to believe in ghosts, but at the same time the idea is much more beautiful than most other superstitions. We came to the conclusion that we had to believe in ghosts, because it was too pretty an idea not to.

I have been in to the idea of ghosts for some time, mainly the metaphoric idea that someone is both there and not there, that someone is both alive and dead, and that a person is in the constant state of watching (which seems to be most of what ghosts do). And of course, if one looks closely at my description of ghosts, one can see that it is really cinema that I am describing.

There are a number of films that play with this idea of cinema, most notably ‘Wings of Desire,’ and ‘Russian Ark,’ but I find where the idea takes on most resonance is when watching early, pre-1913 films (or Italian Neo-Realism films). The emphasis on seeing in these films, constantly foregrounds the presence of the past, and the spectatorship of the act of living, which are the two defining features of non-plot based cinema.

Its rather easy to romanticize ghosts, they belong to a romantic past, they watch the living with desire, they are absorbed in their memories, they are the first to notice the beauty of the simple act of living.

In a film theater, one can never tell if the ghosts are the characters on screen or the people in the audience.

2007-02-11T22:00:00.000+01:00

Solaris is known for being the least 'artsy' of Tarkovsky's films, and because of that I've had to argue with many people that the film shouldn't be under-estimated.

While the film is based on a novel, I find it hard to see, from watching the film, how it could have been written as a novel. The film plays with questions about a person's knowledge of their lover, questions about eternal life, and issues of presence and absence, but it plays with all of these issues in a way that constantly returns to the issue of cinema.

The plot, in the simplest form, involves a psychologist who goes to a space station to investigate strange things happening on board. The station orbits a planet which is supposed to be alive and has strange powers. After spending some time on the station he discovers his dead wife living in his room. The other people on the station explain that the planet can create individuals based on the person's memory of them, though these individuals are only manifestations from memory, and not the actual person. The man has a hard time dealing with this woman who is his wife, but is not really his wife, the woman asks the other scientists to destroy her (she cannot commit suicide) so she does not hurt him anymore.

The reason why I have a hard time imagining this in book form (I would like to read the book soon), is because the physical existence of the woman is so deeply accentuated in the film, that it is hard to dismiss her as an idea, a delusion if you will. The film is constant emphasizing that she is there, and that she has form (not to mention that she is beautiful). She feels the effects of gravity, she goes into spasms of pain. Yet in the beginning she appears out of nowhere.

The idea I think intersects with the description of the afterlife in the first episode of The Decalogue, where the Father tells his son that after someone dies the memories are important "that they smiled a lot, that a tooth is missing." After someone dies they go from being an individual with the possibility to possibility to inspire love, or anger, or to act upon a situation. When you are dead you are nothing but an idea, what the Decalogue says is that the afterlife is really the idea of your living potential. It is the longing memory of something magical that no longer is, something living, breathing, and trembling.

In Solaris the 'no longer exists' exists again. The idea of a person returns to the full potentiality of that person in a physical form. Not only does she again have the potential to inspire feelings, but she has the full physicality of life, with all the suffering and beauty it implies... the psychologist in his state of breakdown discusses the possibility that humans cannot accept God's miracles.

I could not really tell you how to answer all the questions this film brings up. Whether or not the idea of a person is the same as a person except for the lack of potential. No one could tell you the full value of physicality (except maybe Heidegger). But what affirms in a way that seems to have to me the force of a logical arguement is that the true self is not a set of emotions or attitudes, that the soul and the body are in essence one thing, and neither can be judged as good or evil.

There are only two things that this movie finds it possible to judge, life, which is full of the wonder of beauty and possibility, and death, which is only the horror of silence.

The movie is beautiful, you should buy Solaris here

2007-02-10T15:00:00.000+01:00

This is a movie that I enjoy talking about, but no one really enjoys listening about. Hopefully though, my readers are the type who enjoy reading about pornographic films made by a notorious Japanese New Wave director (Oshima Nagisa). In the Realm of the Senses is really a very beautiful movie, and conceptually it complicates an issue that most people would rather remain simple.

The film is based on the true story of Abe Sada, a Japanese woman, who in 1936 developed an obsessive love affair with Ishida Kichizo, which ended with her asphyxiating him and cutting off his genitals. She carried his genitals in a little bag around her neck until she was picked up by the police 3 days after the crime.

What is so interesting about the story, and the film only alludes to, is that Abe Sada garnered a large amount of sympathy in Japan, while the country was in the process of invading China. In many ways, the actions of Sada and Ishida were seen as a reaction to the militarization of society. While the Japanese were speaking of sacrifice of life for the country, and strict dicipline, Sada and Ishida were escaping society to sacrifice their lives purely for the sake of passion.

This is never explicitly said in the film, but the war is constantly an undertone. The most explicit moment when the escape from militarization is depicted is when Ishida is seen on the sidewalk of street filled with soldiers marching to the war, Ishida is trying to make his way through the crowds watching them in order to get back to his lover. This theme is also ever present in the desire of Ishida to give up his life for a greater cause, the cause though is only the woman he loves, and not the abstract idea of a country.

Japanese citizens in 1936 were racing towards death, post-war literature in Japan always describes the overwhelming feeling of the inevitability of death during this time, not an eventual death, but death within a few years, many Japanese had resigned themselves to the fact that they would never grow old. The two characters in this film embody that attitude, they just choose to sacrifice their life for passion, and not country. Their society has well prepared them for death.

The film is pornographic, and is also known for being at the center of one of the most famous censorship trials in Japanese history. Details of the trial are in a book of Nagisa's collected essays, and I suggest reading the book for more details, some of the other essays collected in it are quite nice. The film also has beautiful cinematography at points.

Buy in the Realm of the Senses

Buy Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima

2007-02-09T20:33:00.000+01:00

L'Etoile De Mer has the unfortunate problem of being one of the most interpretable of the films made by the surrealists, it has the fortunate problem of being one of the best.

Since it is a surrealist film it is really impossible to describe the plot, there is some sort of hinting at a plot, that involves starfish, obsessive men, and half clothed women, but none of it makes very much sense unless you interpret everything.

I on the whole, hate interpreting things, allegory is a rather outdated concept, and I don't really believe that the surrealists were very fond of it. Unfortunatly because they talked about dreams a lot people associated surrealism with pop psychology, and came to the conclusion that surrealist artwork can be "interpreted" to get at the "true meaning."

There is a rather famous interpretation of this film, by a guy whose name I don't feel the need to remember, which describes this film as being about the vagina dentata. I think this interpretation is ridiculous, and I'm not going to mention it further, I won't even define what a vagina dentata is for people who can't get the jist of Latin.

I only mention it at this point, because it derives its interpretation from something very purposefully done by the film makers. A line from surrealist poet Robert Desnos "There is nothing quite as charming as a woman's teeth," is juxtaposed with the bottom half of the woman, and then the woman undressing.

I'm prone to take this statement very seriously, and I think anyone who has a sense of surrealism will do the same. Instead of saying the combination of shots means something different from what it describes, I would argue that the combination of shots emphasizes the mysteriousness (the surrealness if you will), of sexual attraction. Because no matter how much people talk about various "trends" in eroticism, what people really erotically attach themselves to is quirks in the physical appearance of someone. I for one really do find woman's teeth positivly charming (and I'm sure more than one of my readers would agree), and I am positive that more people are attracted to their various lovers for the little things that they do then they are for their sexual organs.

Sexual obsession (which the surrealists loved), has little to do with the actual sexual act. Whenever one gets involved with another person, whether you are the most calloused of seducers, or most holy of prudes, there is a sense of mystery about how you ended up knowing a person in this way, and the full expression of people is always more than overwhelming. This was no small theme in surrealism, and it is really what this film is about.

When watching a surrealist film, one should never try to interpret it, one has to let the innate strangeness disconnect you from "understanding," and let you feel the overpowering beauty, hilarity, and in the end, the innate realness of the experience of the unreal... That is, the experience of love.

Buy L'Etoile De Mer

2007-02-08T23:56:00.000+01:00

Though this is a short film, it is probably my favorite Keaton short. And Keaton of course is one of those comedians who always promotes the mystical in commentators.

Besides a number of catchy gags (most notably the spinning house gag), what really makes this movie wonderful is a short scene in which Keaton's girl paints two hearts with an arrow through them on the side of the house. Keaton sees what she's doing and kisses her, then he walks away. Chaos ensues

This one scene is the only scene in the entire movie that isn't totally ridiculous, and, if you ask me, that one scene describes something of the essence of love. Keaton of course is always straight faced, his adventures are in a way always normal for him. What really characterizes the marriage in this movie is an absurd accentuation of "in sickness and in health etc. etc." Both characters see this house building as the first adventure in their life together, and the fact that they can't really take themselves, or this house seriously, makes it all the more delightful for them.

What I mean, is love is something that cannot be said in words, only in actions which are pointless, actions filled with incomprehensible affection. Of course who better to express such things then silent comedians, who always seem to be the only things to makes sense in a world overwhelmed with absurdity.

2007-02-07T23:52:00.000+01:00

Blockade is currently running the film festival circuit, and it is unclear how much distribution it is going to get. It has been doing well though, with showing at two of the top Czech film festivals (this is the only film market I am really following, since I live in the country. I get American film news by osmosis).

If you do happen to see that this film is showing anywhere, I suggest going to see it. The film is not really a film in the usual sense. It is a collection of amateur film images taken during the blockade of Stalingrad during World War II. If any of you don't know your World War II history I suggest checking wikipedia's entry on the battle of Stalingrad. Suffice it to be said here, that the film is about one of the most bloody battles in human history, where over the course of 6 months nearly 2 million people died.

I have a certain facination with the idea of war and our ability for understand the actual experience of being sent knowingly to your death for something resembling a cause (At one point during the battle the average life expectancy for a Russian soldier was a day). Film can never depict 'what war is.' As Bazin says, “War, with its harvest of dead bodies, its immense destructiveness, its countless migrations, its concentration camps, and its atomic bombs, leaves far behind the creative art that aims at reconstituting it.”

If film wants to depict war, it has to instead show a concept deriving from the idea of war, and one that is filmable. Thus the innumberable war films that we see every day, are either about the glory of fighting for your country, or the tragedy of dying for your country (often both, depending on your political persuasion). Neither of these 'ideas' really give any credence to the fact that war inevitably involves dying, they have to cleverly avoid the subject because dying is something that is impossible to understand, and the horrors of war leave far behind the creative art that aims at reconstituting it.

Certain films, and I usually classify these films as brilliant (see Apocalypse Now, and After Life), manage to get past this impossible challenge, and play directly with the idea of life and death, the wonder of one, and the horror of the other. I generally go into a war film hoping that this is the issue at hand, not "honor" "glory" or even "tragedy." War is about death and horror, nothing more, and its films should be about the same.

I was not disappointed by Blockade, though I did get something that I did not expect. I expected to go into a film that showed the experience of people surrounded by death. What the film shows you is people surrounded by life. This hour long film is made up of a collection of images of people walking the streets, going to the grocery store, talking to each other. Though people were dying everywhere, what you saw was people trying their best to live, you saw that life has to go on despite the murders all around us.

The last shot was of people being hung, those were the only dead bodies you see in the entire film.

The film is one of the best expressions I've seen of the need to live.

I have not been able to find any place to buy the DVD, if anyone finds one, please contact me.

2007-02-06T22:07:00.000+01:00

Milos Forman just turned 75, so I figured it's a good time to look back at where his career started.

Black Peter was Forman's first feature length film, and while I don't think its the best of his ensemble pieces (in my opinion that is Taking Off), it has a lot of things to say for it.

The film follows a young man, who just got a job at a supermarket. Of course its a commie supermarket, so people are allowed to check out on their own and they are expected not to steal anything. Peter's job is to make sure they really don't. He is comically bad at his job, and ends up following some guy all day who he thinks has stolen something, but ends up being the boss' friend.

The middle part of the movie involves him courting this pretty young girl. He is not very good at courting her, and he's always being harassed by a young drunk workman. His romance does not go so well, and he goes back to work without getting another date.

At work the next day, he lets someone get away with theft, he tells his father later, who gives him a long lecture, then the young workman (no longer drunk) comes in to return some money he borrowed the day before. The father praises the workman's work ethic, and continues his rant.

The last little bit is quite tricky. The workman watches the lecture, and when his friend asks him if he is ready to go, the workman says "wait this is just getting good." The father response, "Do you know what you're talking about! Do you have any idea idea at all!" The father then raises his hands over his head in a look of angry resignation, and goes into a freeze frame. Peter looks up at him in surprise, and you get another shot of the freeze frame.

The first thing that should be noted is that Vladimír Pucholt, who plays the workman, is really freakin' funny in this movie (as he is in most movies he is in). The second thing that should be noted is the ending, which deserves longer discussion.

Freeze frames are something of a cliché of the 60s new wave movement. The first official 'New Wave' movie, Truffaut's 400 Blows, used the freeze frame to invoke the unknown fate of the child after that moment (of course if we've watched the 4 sequels we know that the youth gets into all sorts of crazy hi-jinx as he grows up... which really ruins the effect). The freeze frame is often use in a vaguely similar fashion in other New Wave films, often instead of showing what decision the main character makes at a turning point a freeze frame leaves the character and the audience suspended to "think about it."

Forman uses the freeze frame very differently. First of all it is the parent, not the child who is freeze framed, second of all, the freeze frame is interrupted by the curious youth.

There are so many ways you could 'read' this image, its worth playing around with. The film has the father do something really 'surprising,' it has him freeze in mid-motion, while its tempting to read this as a sign of impotence, frustration, I think a lot more can be done with the idea of a role reversal - one doesn't know what the future holds for the parents. What is really nice about this idea is that the future of the parents is in much deeper peril than Forman could have known at the time of making the film. The father has probably lived through the Austrian empire, the republic, the Nazis, the communists, and of course the Russians would invade only a few years after this film was made. The father depicts this lesson for the son by turning into a freeze frame.

"Do you even understand?" The world is much more complicated then all this, ideas invade the real world. Cinema invades human life. Countries invade countries. Moments last sometimes.

Buy Black Peter

2007-02-05T21:41:00.000+01:00

The film is a classic of 1990's indie culture, and as a classic of 1990's indie culture it is filled with 1990's indie clichés. It is also about as charming as a film can be.

The plot - a guy gets out of prison, which he was in because he took the rap for someone else in order to repay a debt to a bookie. When he gets out of jail he kidnaps a girl and tells her that he wants her to pretend to be his wife when he sees his parents, she agrees... for some reason. His parents really couldn't give a damn that he's been gone, and aren't really paying attention to the lies he's telling them about where he's been. The girl plays her part well, and afterwards keeps hanging around him. She really is in love with the guy for some reason, she keeps telling him he's nice and sweet, and eventually he stops being a bastard. He becomes nice and sweet, and buys her a heart shaped cookie.

The point of the movie is really a part of the cliché. The point being that people are a product of their environment, and that you can change people by believing in them. There is a series of moments where people are spotlighted because they are showing off their special talent, and the film describes the kind of human underside of calloused people, and the kind of human love needed to bring that human side out.... One doesn't really get that at first viewing though, because the characters aren't so much calloused as they are quirky, though another indie cliche, it is more charming then the "moral" of the story.

The best scene in the film by far, is the "spanning time" scene, the guy wants the girl to take pictures with him for his parents, but he always gets mad because she ruins the photos by making faces, kissing him, smiling, etc... she wants to make it look like they are a couple who is happy together. He tells her thats not what he wants at all, he wants to look like a couple that is "spanning time" together.

Any quick transcription of how he describes spanning time would not make it sound charming, but if you mention 'spanning time' to any young person who likes Indie movies, and was between 16 and 25 when this film came out, they might swoon. Because the tone that he describes 'not smiling and having fun, just spanning time,' makes it seem sweet, cute, kind of funny. It makes it seem as though you would want to span time with the guy. What the moment really describes, is the value of spending time with someone, absent of the content. Even people acting like bastards can be charming in their way, and ultimatly have value. (See What is Cinema #3 for more about this)

What makes the film really work, and makes the clichés less noticable then in some other indie films, is the fact that the unlovable characters really are lovable. The film is about the value of being with someone, and we, as the audience, enjoy being with the film. Whether being a bastard or not, the characters are describing how good we feel about them.

Buy Buffalo '66 here

2007-02-05T20:48:00.000+01:00

"The gal I love
she's long and tall
she moves her body
like a cannonball."
- Dink's Song,
Traditional American

I was thinking about my girlfriend the other day (who I'm crazy about), and I noticed that I seem to think about her in montage. This is of course the abstract idea of my girlfriend, which is a lot of smiles, glances, sitting around, and lying in bed, those nice things that we do together that draw my attention to the fact that we are together, without having to worry about the where and the why of it. Us spanning time, to quote Vincent Gallo. I'm fairly certain this is a common way to think of loved ones, though I'm really basing that assumption on bad music videos and symbolist poetry (Rimbaud has a lovely poem about kissing a girl's breasts, and the trees swaying in the background, and her laughing, and saying nonsense... the bastard was 15 when he wrote it)...

I feel compelled to say something along the lines of "of course my girlfriend is more deep then a series of images," but I hesitate, because I'm inclined to feel that there is something deeper to this set of images then can ever be contained in in any conception of who or what a person is.

If we say that someone is nice, or that someone is mean, the statements are both horribly imprecise. The statements are based on the mistaken idea that we can equate identity with action. A more correct statement would be along the lines of, "this person did something nice," "I believe the person is nice based on several of his or her actions," or "this person is capable of acting nice as can be told by his or her actions," all of these statements are really rather meaningless.

A collection of visual images. Like the description of the afterlife in the Decalogue, I find far deeper. When I draw up a mental image of my girlfriend sitting in a room with me doing nothing, I am aware that she can exist in a non-judgable state. That she can for a moment be neither good, bad, nice or mean, that before that she just is (sitting). If I add to that that I can see her, then I know that we spent time together, that we were comfortable together, that she could expose to me that she just was. If I remember that the image was in the past, then it reminds one how time eats away at us all. How she gets older everyday, how she will eventually no longer be. How every moment that she is... that she is with me... is far more important than if she is nice or mean, or happy or sad. What a collection of images of my girlfriend tells me is that she is a solid fleshy thing, not immune to time, that the trembles with life, and that blood flows in her veins, that she's lovely, and she will always be lovely as long as she is, because she moves through the world with a kind of determination that only living things have, and is thoroughly and unexplainably magical.

In my opinion understanding this about a person is what relationships are about.

Barthes said photography is about death, Bazin that it was a kind of continuation of the idea of someones life. Cocteau more poetically said that "mirrors are the doors through which death enters and exits, if you look in a mirror your whole life you will see death's hand at work," Gallo asked that a photograph be about "spanning time." A photograph, and a film, should remind you that there is a certain magic to the fact that someone is living and breathing, and that you should fall in love with everything.

On the street today, I saw a young woman walking with a baby carriage down the street. She looked serious, or possibly angry. When I saw her I saw all the fury of the God's creation. Living, trembling.

That is cinema.

2007-02-04T13:23:00.000+01:00

What can really be said about this film, which can be considered one of the cornerstones of modern cinema.

Well first of all, as much as Quentin Tarantino bothers me, his commentary on the DVD is really quite good for getting a background on the film. As Tarantino mentions, this film was made during a lull in making Ashes of Time, Chungking Express though really became the model for all the films Wong Kar-Wai made after this: stunning cinematography, playful characters, a focus on the strange, lovely things one does while in love, (in 2046 he takes this to an extreme).

The film is above everything else fun to watch. Given that the other two directors usually mentioned in the "best living directors" list (Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-Hsien) are slow meditational directors, it is good to occasionally see how much can be done with cinema at a high speed. Add to that Christopher Doyle's flashy camera work, and its hard not to enjoy this film. All the actors are charming, especially Faye Wong, but Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung are quite enjoyable to watch as well.

The real charming thing about the story is all the little quirks. The film contains two completly seperate stories about policemen falling in love, but in order to give you a full sense of the story I would have to describe all the little pointless things that happen in the film, like one of the policeman eating 30 cans of expired pineapples in one night, or the other policeman talking to his dishrag.

I'm not going to say anything else about this movie. If you haven't seen it, I insist that you do so right now. It is not one of those films that should be described in words.

Though I do want to add to Tarantino's commentary, that Faye Wong is not only a huge pop star, she's the only Chinese pop star who can really wail. I suggest buying her self-titled CD if you get the chance.

Buy Chungking Express here

Buy Faye Wong's self titled CD

2007-02-03T13:20:00.000+01:00

One of the great things about all of the Universal Horror films (or essentially all the horror films made before Hitchcock popularized surprise effects), is the way they manage to combine really superb conceptual work with a complete disregard for anything resembling a coherent style. While Dracula and Frankenstein are much more stylistically intense film, conceptually nothing can surpass The Mummy.

(I should note at this point that the film was directed by Karl Freund, who is known to be one of the best cinematographers ever. Leave it to be said though that I don't remember the style as much as I remember the conceptual work.)

The film centers on one of those strikingly good looking Eastern European actresses who seemed to have flocked over to America around this time just to enliven Hollywood productions. In this film she is a lovely English woman with a tendency to wear thick eyeliner. Two men are in love with her, some haughty Englishman, whose father is the archaeologist that uncovered the Mummy's tomb, and the Mummy himself, who was mysteriously brought to life several years earlier. The woman it seems is a reincarnation of the Mummy's ancient love, and he desires to have her back.

Both men face hurdles in their desire to obtain the woman, the Englishman because he is a pompous asshole who is continually proposing sex to her (yay pre-code movies!), and the Mummy because in order to have her he must first kill her. She eventually chooses the Englishman, and we are all disappointed (unless she is still possessed by the princess!!!).

The mummy of course is secretly the good guy in the film. He has been in love with a woman for over 2000 years, and the young Englishman is only interested in a quick screw, but because the poor mummy is 'living impaired,' he has to kill the woman to really be with her, and of course the woman doesn't really love him that much, and would much rather have a toss in the hay with the British guy then eternal love after death.

There are so many ideas running around in that plot that I really don't know where to start. The first noticable thing is the direct connection between death and love, which can be turned wildeian without much of a stretch (' Yet each man kills the thing he loves/By each let this be heard,/Some do it with a bitter look,/Some with a flattering word,/The coward does it with a kiss,/The brave man with a sword!). The idea of death as a marital consumation has been around for a long time, and it can be seen in Double Suicide, and In the Realm of the Senses (I know I chose two Japanese films, just a coincidence).

When the love-death proposal is rejected then the woman is instead given the opportunity of life-sex. A juxtaposition that really would not have been allowed in a film between 1934 and 1960. It is a pleasent juxtaposition too, the idea that the sex act really proves that we are still alive, and that we need to somehow prove that we still exist before our flesh begins to rot in the grave endlessly.

I like this movie, its fun to watch, and it is really about how love consumes you.

Buy the Mummy here

2007-02-02T13:06:00.000+01:00

Frenzy is one of my favorite Hitchcock movies, and I don't just say this because of the wonderful ending. What makes this film really great is that it seems to show the type of director Hitchcock would have been he started his career at a different time. Because while Frenzy is the most grusome of Hitchcock's movies, it is still prototypically Hitchcock

The plot does not need description, but it should be noted that the film uses a theme which is quite clearly Hitchcock's favorite. The main character is falsely accused of some sort of horrific crime, but while he did not commit the crime, he secretly wants to. This theme is most strongly pronounced in Strangers on a Train (in fact, if you take out the Macguffin... Hitchcock's term for the plot that covers up the psycological aspects of the film... Strangers and Frenzy are essentially the same movie), but also Notorious, I Confess, and The Wrong Man.

Hitchcock is also really most in his element when working outside of the Hollywood system. In my modest opinion (and most people seem to disagree with me), his English films are far superior to his Hollywood films, and his best Hollywood film is the one that he made for no money with a TV crew (Psycho). There is a certain freedom in his early English films, and his post studio system films, which is taken as far as possible with Frenzy.

Everyone should see Frenzy just because it is a great film (unless you have a real problem watching movies with sex crimes in them, which I can completly understand). What really makes Frenzy important to my mind though is how it puts the rest of Hitchcock's films in the right light.

Buy Frenzy here

2007-02-01T19:26:00.000+01:00

For anyone has watched very many of Lars Von Triers' movies, it is hard to avoid the thought "my God, this guy really doesn't like women." Most people can talk them out of this conclusion somehow, but the more of his movies that I watch, the more I'm sure my gut reaction is right.

Dogville is about a woman who goes to a small town on the run from gangsters, the townspeople, who originally protect her, eventually start taking advantage of her. Eventually all the men take turns raping her, and they give her over to the gangsters.

While there is a surprise ending that which I won't give away, its fairly easy to conclude after watching a third film that involves a woman suffering extensively for rather abstract reasons, that either the director likes seeing women suffer, he hates men and think that they all make women suffer (or desire to), or he sees these parables as masking a deeper point. In the end all of these arguments come out to the same thing.

The "holy suffering woman" figure is a rather common figure in literature, and has been routinely denounced as sexist. The idea being that women need protection from male sexuality, and that they are always in the position of a "victim." The religious concept of suffering that Von Triers is so big on really just makes matters worse, because it implies a certain value in women suffering.

While the film is interestingly staged, the series of photos that make up the ending credits drives home an anti-American slant in the film that makes me dislike the film even more. In the words of one English friend of mine "anti-Americanism is a lazy prejudice."

There is no doubt that Von Triers knows what he is doing with a camera, but I would find his films much more interesting if he knew what he were doing with a story.

I don't suggest watching this movie, but if you'd like to then you should buy Dogville here

2007-01-31T19:15:00.000+01:00

The film Bright Future originally had the catchy titled "Warning! Jellyfish alert!" Somewhere during the development of the film, someone decided that the title wouldn't attract the kind of audience that this film was aimed towards, and gave the film a more standard name. The original title does describe the plot better though.

The story centers on a young man, who is a bit slow, but in a cute sort of way - like a shy puppy. Him and his best friend live together, dress funny, and work in the same factory, and his friend keeps a poisonous jellyfish in the apartment.

For fairly complex reasons, his best friend ends up murdering their boss, going to jail, and committing suicide while in jail, but before committing suicide he gives his best friends elaborate instructions on how to train his jellyfish to get used to fresh water. The main character destroys the jellyfish's tank in a fit, and the jellyfish gets in to the Tokyo water system.

After the death of friend, the boy makes friends with his friend's father, who kind of adopts him. He also discovers that the jellyfish is alive, and begins to make food for it and dump it in the Tokyo river, when the father figures out that this was his son's last wish he begins to help the boy, until the Jellyfish breeds in to hundreds and thousands of... poisonous... jellyfish (miraculously given that there was just one of them). Tokyo authorities begin exterminating them, but the father wants to save one... he grabs it out of the water and it stings him. He either goes to the hospital, or we see his ghost in the end saying that kids these days are no good (we see the ghost of his son several times in the film).

The two best things about this film is the acting and the way you are drawn into the world of the characters. Both of these things are related. The main character at one point remembers that his boss borrowed his favorite CD, and thus he decides to kill the boss (the boss is already dead when he gets there). Not only does this action seem cute when the main character does it (and his acting is perfectly timed), but in the context of the character one does not understand how he could have done any different. Trying to adapt a jellyfish to fresh water is what these characters would do if they were in jail for murder. And the interaction when the boss is at their house, looking at the jellyfish, is priceless.

The other great thing about this movie is the ambivilence that comes from both the content of the movie, and the film's sketch format. A film director in Japan that I talked to said that the Japanese film industry regularly uses partially developed concepts, because speed of production is often more valuable than a well thought out "idea". What this means is that the places where the symbolic repetoire in this film doesn't really make sense (it often doesn't), it is probably not that you just aren't getting it, it probably just doesn't make sense. On the other hand, as I mentioned above, all the symbolism kind of makes emotive sense. I mean, the friend does not release the poisonous jellyfish on the unsuspecting Tokyo because he wants to kill more people, he does it because that is what one should do in such a situation. Though I could not tell you why, in the context of the film you perfectly understand (there are a few good reasons why one can argue that the story is not simply about how "youth these days are no good"). I think this little disconnect is what really makes the film most enjoyable to watch, because the film deals with symbolism not as though it were a thing one should interpret to reach some deeper truth about the world, but that it is a thing unto itself. To use a big word, the symbolism has its own ontological truth to it. Or to put it more simply, the things in this film, strange, beautiful and horrible, are always escaping their world and coming into ours.

Still, I think the film should have been called "Warning, Jellyfish Alert!"

Buy Bright Future

2007-01-30T20:05:00.000+01:00

The day you see your first Godard film is always a life changing day. Though this is undoubtedly true of the day I watched Contempt back in my Sophmore year of college, I would have much rather my first experience with Godard be Band of Outsider or Pierrot le Fou.

My reason is one that many people might not agree with. While I am firmly of the belief that all cinema has a real association with love, the purpose of Contempt is the opposite, to inspire a lack of love, to inspire an unforgivable lack of feeling towards the characters in the film. It accomplishes this quite well, making the film hard to watch but unquestionably brilliant.

Like most of Godard's films (if not all), Contempt is a film about film. Not only are the main characters a scriptwriter, a producer, and a director, but the film makes you aware of the camera from the beginning. The first shot has the two lovers of the story talking in bed, with Bridgette Bardot naked above the covers, the lens filter changes several times in the scene, constantly casting the shot in different colors.

The most striking scene in the film, is the argument the couple has in their apartment. The apartment is only half completed and looks sort of like a film set. As the tension builds up Godard breaks more and more cinematic rules (most noticeably he cuts cross the 180 degree line quite a few times), which catapults the tension into the final breakdown, when the couple's polite argument ends with Bardot telling her boyfriend that it isn't that she has stopped loving him, its that she holds total contempt for him.

The easiest way for this film to be read is as a critique of the place of women in visual culture, similar to the arguments made ten years later by Laura Mulvey in her essay "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," or by John Berger in the book "Ways of Seeing." Unfortunately just because that's the easiest way to read the film does not make it the correct way to read the film, and I think if we look at where it is in Godard's canon this interpretation really does not even make sense.

Instead I would argue that he plays on the contrast between the film industry and the things that it is filming. Those living things under the camera, and the business of making money off of them. The main crime of the man who is hated in this film is to get more wrapped up in the making of a Hollywood film with a sleazy producer, then he is in inspiring passion in Bridget Bardot (I was going to say "his girlfriend" but I think if your girlfriend is Bridget Bardot she is in her own category). He thinks that she has stopped loving him because she erroneously thought he wanted her to sleep with the producer, but she responds that it is just because he cannot inspire feelings in her anymore (the exact quote is quite nice, but I forget what it is). The point being, that the problem is not that she is being objectified, it is that she is not being objectified in the way one looks at an object of love, as something different from you, and slightly magical, not as the third party to a business negotiation.

The reason I am almost sure this argument is right, is because of Godard's relationship with Anna Karina at this time (the film was made in 1963). In any film with Anna Karina in it - lets say from Vivre Sa Vie (1962) to Pierrot Le Fou (1965) - Godard finds a way to tell the audience everything he likes about this woman, her legs, her eyes, the way she walks, talks dances, Godard tries to point to all the reasons he enjoys watching her, and likewise you enjoy watching her, or watching her being watched by Godard. Watching someone is something you do with a person you love, not a person you do not value.

You want desperately to love both these characters, but Godard refuses to let either of them insight your passion.

Buy Contempt

2007-01-29T21:07:00.000+01:00

I highly suggest you watch this film, even if just for the segment directed by Chytilová.

Hailed as the "Manifesto of the Czech New Wave," the film doesn't really live up to the rest of the films of the movement. Directed by five of the top New Wave directors (minus Forman), and all based off works by Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech writer who would continue to be Menzel's muse throughout his career. Chytilová's piece far surpasses all of Menzel's Hrabal based works (all of which I like), and surpasses all the pieces in this Portmanteau as well.

That's not to say they are all bad. The stories are all alot more noticably surrealist than other Hrabal works (though that might just be the low quality subtitles on the DVD). Hrabal's works all border on surrealism, but fairly early on in his career he went from stories bordering on non-sense to "realistic" stories about fanciful people in fanciful situations. Nemec's piece is a nice still piece with two men lying about their career in order to avoid death. The best piece other then Chytilová's is Schorm's piece about two insurance salesmen who try to sell insurance to a semi-crazy guy who draw's murals all over his house, inspired by his almost crazy mother (they give up in the end).

In Chytilová's piece, prior to the start a man is arrested during his wedding and a woman commits suicide. The woman's lover talks about them making death masks for one another, and the bride comes down, drunk, not willing to go home alone on her wedding night. The man and the bride go home together, and there is a beautiful slow motion scene of her wedding gown in a high wind, and him tearing off pieces of the gown to tie up trees that are falling down.

All the different segments in this film are really about the way we need to interact with each other's imaginary worlds really to survive. Each of the characters live in a world that is closer to fantasy then reality, but each of these fantasy's interact impeccably well to create a moment of human connection. Human connection not just in the sense of knowing each other, but in the sense of each other's worlds interacting. Thus the mismatched characters like the boy and the gypsy girl, or the quiet man and the drunken bride, create beautiful moments together, and lies are much more real than the truth.

And Chytilová's film is beautiful.

Buy Pearls of the Deep

2007-01-28T15:11:00.000+01:00

If you wondered about the pictures attached to each posting, here is the reason why.

I had a fantasy some time ago, which I originally wanted to make the theme of this website. I didn't, but the man has played an important part in my understanding of how I want the site to develop

In the fantasy there was a man who invented a light capturing machine. The machine involved a large collection of mirrors that funnel light waves and collect them on wax cylinders. These cylinders could be played back like films, showing images caught without a camera. They are just reflections of light which has traveled a thousand miles (similar to how the light reflecting off flowers can turn a blank wall pink, just over a longer distance). The machine would be a combination of a ham radio, and Lumiere cinematograph, and the cylinders would just show a collection of images of people's life. It would be the most beautiful thing in the world.

I wrote a love letter once with this machine in it (I know, its a bit weird that I write love letters about film, but it works). In the letter I told the girl about how I entered the guys house, inside it covered with books and papers, the machine was in the back, and you almost couldn't see it in all the clutter. On the wall was a collection of old vintage photographs, some newer photographs. On his desk, and on the wall, he had sketches he had made from some of the wax cylinders, someones lips, a part of an arm, trees, the feet of a cat who was asleep. He explained the machine to me, and then showed me a few of the wax cylinders. A few images were projected on the wall, people walking around their house in the morning, ducks, a river, a forest, a desert, a building, curtains, there was ten minutes of empty sky, a bird, people in crowds, a man smiling, a woman in a shop, three cars on a street, people walking, a restaurant, a park bench (empty), swings, the eye of someone (I couldn't tell the gender), several cats at different times, an empty field, a deer, a bridge over a small stream, lots and lots of people.

Somewhere in there I saw her.

2007-01-28T14:38:00.000+01:00

If you ever meet someone from Russia who was born after 1975, and you mention you've seen this movie, you will immediately be their friend. The film seems to be in the style of a sketch film, though the style doesn't so much capture "moments in time," as sketch films usually do, but instead is used to accentuates the haphazardness of the main characters actions, and his never ending resourcefulness.

The essential plot is that a young man, after finishing his time in the military, goes to Moscow to find his brother, who is involved in local organized crime. The brother wants to get rid of one of his competitors without looking like he is responsible, so he gets his brother to do it, and then tries to sell him out to the rival gang. The brother though, despite being in his early twenties, and more concerned with girls and music then with money and crime, is unusually good with guns, a fast thinker, and can always get the better of the people who are after him.

Though I'm not Russian, I've always had the impression that Russians like to look at themselves like the main character of this movie. They like simple things, are nice to people, just wander around from day to day, but for some reason everyone is always after them, and they have to be resourceful to survive. The main character in this film seems to just be wandering from place to place trying to make his way in Moscow, making friends with people on the street, and he just occasionally has to shoot up a member of the mafia that's after him.

Its a charming film, see it if you have the chance.

Buy Brother here

2007-01-27T13:43:00.000+01:00

I first saw this film in High School, and I had actually avoided it for a long time because I thought, due to the name and the cover, that it looked like a rather dull horror movie (I thought from the picture on the cover that Marlon Brando's faces was melting). When I finally found out it wasn't a horror movie, I mentioned the mistake to my Dad, who said "well actually it kind of is." When I saw the movie I understood what he was talking about.

The movie is written by the man who I consider to be the best war writer of all time, Michael Herr, who wrote the brilliant novel Dispatches. He is also known for writing Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Herr stands at the forefront of a discussion about the legitimate possibility of writing war literature, and representing war to someone who hasn't been there.

The debate in short:

There is a long standing debate over whether it is possible to make an anti-war film at all. Truffaut answered a direct "no," which lead Godard to take up the challenge by, unfortunately, making Les Carabiniers. The argument is essentially that all representation of war treats war as a spectacle that is interesting. It also cannot fail but glorify people who constantly face death, while at the same time the film cannot possibly show the reality of death. Hence, Saving Private Ryan showed that war was ugly, but also that it was ultimately about the heroics of sacrificing one's life for a greater good. There is no real sense in Saving Private Ryan of the full sacrifice that losing ones life entails, we would need to get into theology for that. (there is a similar argument about holocaust films, but that's a whole other movie)

There is a parallel argumentabout the possibility of war literature making sense in the least. Both Tim O'Brien and Michael Herr argue that war literature has to always border on the surreal. Tim O'Brien wrote essays about the strange things that are part of any Vietnam veteran's experience, that cannot be properly encompassed in regular narratives. O'Brien talked about soldiers hearing Vietnamese society parties in the middle of the jungle, Champagne and all. Herr wrote about a battle where hundreds of North Vietnamese were killed, but when the battlefield was inspected only 4 bodies were found. Dispatches is completely without a narrative.

Its because of this, that my Dad argued, and I agree that the last lines of Marlon Brando, "the horror, the horror," should be taken very literally. When we think about war we tend to think about it in the strategic way, or in the tragic way. We have to accomplish goals through force, or we are dying heroically for a worthwhile or worthless cause. What this film does instead is try to show that when your life is constantly in danger, when human life is taken down to minimum value, its impossible to really understand what is going on around you. Things become crazy very fast, and human life, the basis of all value in our world, is the most quickly disposed of object in this situation. Thus the constant atrocities that are a part of every war.

I think what makes Abu Gharibsuch a frightening situation, is that the photographs resemble nothing which we can recognize from human life, yet images such as these are essentially par for the course when it comes to international warfare. These situations happen in EVERY war, and to think that Bush can blame the atrocities on "a few bad eggs" (that all happened to be working together), shows either a disconnection from reality or a disregard for life.

Apocalypse Now is about the horror we see in Abu Gharib photos, in images from the Nanjing massacre, in tails from Mailai. The horror that something you cannot see may be trying to destroy you, something unspeakably evil, something just like you or me, something gaudy and carnivalesque, that looks like your family and loved ones, your country and your president. In other words, you and me.

The film is frightening.

Buy Apocalypse Now here

2007-01-26T15:43:00.000+01:00

I've noticed that film studies people tend to venerate the Marx Brothers in an almost religious way. Antonin Artaud famously called them revolutionary (speaking of Monkey Business actually), and said it was unfortunate that Americans didn't understand their own culture and realize that the Marx Brothers were the world's greatest force for destroying class structures. When I pointed out to one of my old teachers that the Marx Brothers mixed two genres he said couldn't be mixed (in "Go West,") he simply said "well the Marx Brothers can do anything."

And that they can. This film is, if not the best, among the best Marx Brothers films to be made, which essentially makes it one of the best comic films to be made. Like all surrealist comedy all sense of order in the world seems to constantly break down when these fellows are involved, which is the perfect scenario for one to fall in love, and Groucho complies.

I long have said that I stole all of my flirting tactics from silent movies (mostly Clara Bow and Charlie Chaplin movies). I've discovered recently that many of my relationship behaviors are taken from Groucho Marx. I cannot dance worth a damn, but I enjoy, with my girlfriend, half dancing and half throwing her around. I like to try to talk her slightly dizzy.

I think that's what's so great about this film, it puts the real world in interaction with the ideal world, the world where love is melodramatic, people run circles around each other, and everything is more ridiculous than it is coherent. And of course the heroes always save the day, because in the end they can wrap the villains up in their little world, where a gun is a joke, and a crime that is well planned out is not nearly as good as one that no one can make sense of.

Buy Monkey Business

2007-01-25T23:55:00.000+01:00

I find this movie really quite bad, but at the same time interesting. Its worth a watch if this is the type of thing your interested in.

Essentially this film is a Wenders film masquerading as an Antonioni film, and while I have the highest respect for Antonioni, I really don't have any interest in seeing any more Wenders films than I already have.

Antonioni was ostensibly the director of the film, the only issue being that he was rendered mute from a stroke, so Wenders had to do all the real directing for him. It is to be assumed that Antonioni signed off on the film at the end, but Wenders has supposedly said that "Antonioni blinked, and I knew what it meant."

As a film about film the movie is really quite interesting (despite being poorly done), the essential plot is that a director (played by Malkovich) walks through cities, letting things happen to him, and letting his mind get carried away with stories built off these moments. I think the film really tries to be what film should be, a series of captured moments that have a sort of surreal beauty. The displacement in time, the physical body, the illusory sense of touch, most of all the disconnectedness of events. Film as a medium brings you things out of time, that capture your imagination, that stay with you as a quasi-fictional memory. The film expresses Antonioni's attempts to use film to grab on to the fleeting feeling of living, to deal with all the minor details of being alive. Which is touching coming from a stroke victim.

Unfortunately the film was directed by Wim Wenders.

Buy Beyond the Clouds

2007-01-24T21:43:00.000+01:00

I saw this film at the 2006 Karlovy Vary Film Festival. It had been quite big on the film festival circuit, but I do not think that it has been, or will be release in America. Which is really too bad.

Shortly before heading off to the Czech Republic I had been talking with my Uncle about American's general prejudice against anything not Hollywood. He responded with the insightful comment that "people just want to be entertained." I was tempted to start talking about the joys of watching Godard, but I doubted that would convince him right away. (later I was talking to him about the similarities between the French Avant-Garde and the Marx Brothers, to which I got a blank stare). After seeing this movie, I knew it was exactly what would convince him.

The movie is essentially an engenius romantic comedy a la 'The Rules of the Game' or 'The Hop Pickers,' mixed with an insightful view into the nature of our social system a la 'Airplane!' or 'Un Chien Andalou,' or really any Marx Brothers film. What I really mean by that is the film doesn't make sense, and does so both beautifully and hilariously. Like all good films I could not explain the plot to you if I tried (he cuts off his finger, loses it, finds it, reattaches it, but its someone elses finger, they switch fingers, he falls in love, a character from a magazine soap opera comes alive, the girl he loves start collecting plastic bottles, her mountain of plastic bottles grows gigantic, everyone grows a tail except him, there's a happy ending), what's really important is that it covers a number of themes that only brilliant films can really cover well.

First of all, everything is always ridiculously chaotic. This is important if one is going to have a good romantic comedy (which is why they are so few and far between). I'm convinced that the Rules of the Game is not brilliant because of its criticism of the elites, but the fact that there is a 20 minute chase scene in the end involving 8 different participants (I didn't actually count). Similarly it's the key ingrediant of surrealist comedies like Airplane! and Un Chien Andalou (don't argue with my classificiation system).

Second, everyone seems lost all the time in their own little world. This is why Julia Roberts doesn't make good Romantic Comedies and a film with as ridiculous a premise as "The Girl Next Door" (which I thought I would hate), was amazing. Romantic Comedies are good when they are about a disorienting mixing of two people's worlds, not when they're about people looking emotional in the moonlight, and children saying funny things (Sleepless in Seattle). When the dopey intelligent guy in 'The Hop Pickers' starts going on about how much he loves this girl, and she responds by saying 'good good good' while trying to figure out how she can take advantage of his living situation, you really feel like you love the two characters (again, i don't think this movie is released in America, I suggest anyone who can get their hands on it to do so), when Tom Cruise is talking to that kid in 'Jerry Macguire' you really feel like you could hit him.

Lastly, it takes the premise from 'Un Chien Andalou' and any Marx Brothers film, that everything kind of makes sense, but the order of things is constantly breaking down (Un Chien Andalou in a more technical way). You recognize Pod's journey enough that when the taxi driver suddenly becomes the Ghost Taxi Driver, all you can do is laugh.

Its not available on Amazon. If you want to buy the movie try here

2007-01-23T23:46:00.000+01:00

Like most ten part mini-series', some segments of the Decalogue are better than others. I find the fifth gets gets much more praise then it deserves because it has "a point" (thou shalt not kill), and I think "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is wholly mediocre. Ten is amazing (thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods), but there isn't much to talk about in it... it is about stamp collecting though, which is a reason to see the episode in itself.

The two episodes that really blow my hair back are the first (thou shalt have no god but me), and the sixth (thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife), both of these episodes are discourses on vision and its relationship to human life.

The answer that the father in the first episode gives to his son's "what is death/what is left of people after we die" question, is really quite interesting. The Dad says that the memory is important, and then goes on to describe a number of noticable physical features about people (they smile a lot, a tooth is missing, etc.). The Father describes life after death as a film watched in people's memories.

This is followed by the boy looking at his father in parts. His father is teaching a class at a University, and the kid, standing behind something, adjusts himself so he can only see the fathers mouth, his eyes, his hands.

It is never fully stated that the boy dies, though we are nearly sure of it in the end. All that happens is that the boy goes from being visible to not being visible, a movement that is fully associated with the loss and the death of the boy. The boy, so to speak, is removed from the film, and from this we know he is dead.

There is a strange folding in of a reflexive idea in this episode. Memory(film) keeps you alive, but the removal from the film means death. Thus the boy is alive in the father's memory, but in the film he is dead. Perhaps we can say he is something other than physical, though still existant... after all there is a boy in the beginning of the second episode (in the church), who looks an awful lot like him (if anyone reads this and can confirm it is him, please tell me).

In the sixth episode a stalker decides he is in love with a woman by watching her. His love is completly absent from a desire to possess her though. He tells her that he does not want anything from her, or at least he does not know what he wants. The boy has simply become interested in watching her live her life, and find something strangely beautiful in it, that has gone far beyond his original sexual purpose.

She makes fun of him at first, but eventually changes her mind. She goes up to his room (after he has attempted suicide) and sees how he lives his life. In the scene where she is looking at the telescope he uses to look at her you can tell that she begins to understand that this is how a human lives his life, intertwined with hers. There is a connection based on a mutual knowledge of one another's privacy (a knowledge that is generally unaccessable except through peeping or through watching cinema).

There is a sense in this film that Kieslowski really belives cinema is a medium for transmitting love (as Bazin always liked to say). The episode though ends badly. With the two would-be lovers seperated by an emotional wall, and a glass with a circular hole framing the boy like a camera lens.

Buy The Decalogue

2007-01-22T21:35:00.000+01:00

I am fairly certain that L'eclisse is my favorite film. While I would like to describe the film in depth in an effort to convince people to watch it, any description of the plot would not describe what impresses this film upon my life so much.

For one, there really is no plot. She breaks up with a man, meets a new one, but she doesn't love either of them. That's the entire plot summed up. The real content of the film, is in a certain passion that can be seen in the main character, who cannot love the men in her life. If you just read the film as a discourse on the lonliness of modern life, isolation and all the usual tripe that film critics say, then you are really missing the point of the movie. She tells the man at one point"I wish I either loved you a lot more, or didn't love you at all," but their relationship had aspects more important then anything that could simply be termed as "love."

One can most clearly see this in the last scene. They are laying on a couch together (Monica Vitti always wears beautiful skirts), and and when she gets up to leave they start making fun of all the lovers they had seen on the beach that day. The last joke she makes is about the way they first kissed (with a window pane between them)... they laugh, and touch each other. The scene is of one of those beautiful moments in relationships where two people feel okay being silly around each other. The giddiness a person feel around someone else, when they are not sure why they are giddy, but they know that touching the other person makes them feel that way. The absurdity of how much they want to kiss another person. That their physical body draws you in certain mysterious ways.

That moment is caught forever on film. You can see that she's drawn to him, though she would never be able to connect to him any other way then physically. In the context of the film the physical is all that matters, people are what they do, not what they say. A man is a stock broker, but the the way he deals with his losses describes more deeply who he is. She doesn't love Alain Delon, but she feels drawn to him. She doesn't care for the idea of him, but his physical self haunts her mind.

This is what makes the end of the film probably one of the most important moment in the history of cinematic style. The collection of disconnected shots has been interpreted to signify the lovers possible meeting points (empty, because they will no longer meet), but this interpretation forgets the shots of buses, of people's faces, of lights turning on, of buildings - The collection of object images that make up this shot sequence. The end of the film merely shows you things that exist. Things that are beautiful because they exist. Things that exist for a short while, giving some sort of worth to the world. Things that exist, but will eventually pass away. Like the love affair of two people who don't really love each other.

Buy L'eclisse

2007-01-21T16:24:00.000+01:00

"Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.

If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there--the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air--is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its sound-less spectre.

Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont's and saw Lumiere's cinematograph--moving photography."

-Maxim Gorky, 1897

In order to explain the title of my blog... because I worry this name will only attract goths. I wanted to start my first "What is Cinema" post with the above quote. It is one of the earliest reactions to film, and encompasses an experience which I feel is, unfortunatly, all but lost to modern film goers. The idea that cinema is a sort of surreal shadow world, that it captures our life in a way that should not make us comfortable.

Shadows, Ghosts... The article accidentally brings up notions of time. The fact that we see ghosts, acting as they did when they were alive (the Sixth Sense?). Cinema is a segment of past time which is physically attached to the modern world (on a little strip of film), similar to how spiritualists believe intense experiences attach themselves to a location. Thus the disorientation that Gorky experiences when he sees something that is "exists, but is at the same time no longer." (the last quote is Augustine)

In cinema time never pases, only we do.

2007-01-20T23:51:00.000+01:00

Infernal Affairs (2002)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001)

2007-01-20T23:44:00.000+01:00

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

2007-01-20T22:36:00.001+01:00

Before Sunrise (1995)

2007-01-20T22:36:00.000+01:00

Citizen Dog (2004)

2007-01-20T22:30:00.000+01:00

Citizen Dog (2004)
The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966)
Macunaima (1969)
Monkey Business (1931)
Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966)

2007-01-20T22:11:00.000+01:00