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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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