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A point I try to make often in this blog (which comes from a rather outdated discussion in film theory), is that there are two modes of discourse in cinema, there is the allegorical and the ontological.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.

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.

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

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

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