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.

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

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