Merry Christmas from Monika and Yoko ("32 Days of Movies")

December 25, 2011, 1:00 pm

≪ Previous: Avant-Garde: WHAT'S IN A NAME?

When I wrapped "32 Days of Movies" in November, I knew that the project was not quite finished. Now it is.

I have added four entirely new film clips to the series, bringing the grand total up to 370. One is a movie I've owned for years but initially forgot. The others are recent acquisitions, including a December 20 DVD release which helps conclude the final chapter.

Click on any of the screen-caps below and you'll jump to the video page. Check out the appropriate timecode for the clip in question.

Enjoy...

This opens Chapter 10

This appears at 3:45 in Chapter 32

This appears at 4:25 in Chapter 25

This opens Chapter 2

I have also switched the clip for the following. And yes, I know it's spelled wrong (but I'll bet you didn't until I mentioned it...)

This appears at 3:35 in Chapter 20

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Seven Samurai

December 26, 2011, 4:00 am

≫ Next: The Seventh Seal

≪ Previous: Merry Christmas from Monika and Yoko ("32 Days of Movies")

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

The ethos of Seven Samurai – the values it stands for, or at least represents – is compellingly divided. On the one hand, there is a definite communitarian spirit: characters are scolded for striking out on their own, for seeking their self-advantage instead of playing a role that serves the group. Whether they are seeking cowardly self-protection or courageous glory, the message is the same: do not abandon your post, do not sacrifice your duties, for anything. Furthermore, the samurai themselves have little to gain from their actions; they are stoic and dutiful but, as Kambei says in the end, “We were defeated again. We didn’t win, the farmers did.”

The film opens with those farmers, one of whom overhears bandit planning an autumn attack. Panicked, he returns to the other villagers and they agree to hire samurai to protect them. Here, what is probably the central theme of the movie is set in motion: the contrasts between different types of people, and how these contrasts must be dealt with. The tensions between the frightened, petty villagers and the professional, cool samurai is a case in point. Yet even amongst the samurai there are contrasts: each of the warriors is specific, as unique as each of the seven dwarfs (one or two get a bit lost in the shuffle, but at least four have very distinct personalities).

There is no harmonizing aspect here, which might be one reason the film is so popular in the west and has been seen as “too western” by many Japanese critics. Out of these disparate units, Kurosawa does not mold a whole – the different parts come together to form a fighting unit, but in the end they dissolve and even at the height of action, each component remains distinct, serving its own purpose in the overall battle. Throughout Seven Samurai, Kurosawa preaches unity but he practices diversity; he proclaims the value and necessity of the community yet draws our attention to the intricacies of the individual.

Seen in twenty-first century America, I find the interplay of values compelling and rewarding. Today we tend to narrowly slice off and polarize different senses of virtue: for the conservative, pure individualism (at least economically); for the liberal, the values of the community. Seven Samurai would seem to follow the latter path (albeit within a traditional template, making the adjective “liberal” seem rather misplaced) yet at its heart is an entrepreneurial bargain – a matter of free association, for the common good sure, but with a sense of disciplined managerial skills that fits the conservative mindset. Here is where each of the seven samurai come into play, representing different motivations and aspirations.

For Kikuchiyo and Katsushiro, the bargain is one of self-interest. Both want to prove themselves brave samurai, one because he resents his peasant upbringing and has violent energies he wants to channel, the other because he is young and idealistic, desiring to become a warrior like those he admires. For the other samurai, the motivation is a bit more ambiguous – some seem bored with their lot chopping wood or looking for work. For Kyuzo, the silent but deadly type, and Kambei, the wise older leader, it is simply a matter of duty. They are samurai; this is what they do. Even there, there’s a difference: Kyuzo wants to practice and sharpen his skills, while Kambei seems more bound by moral duty. With the motley motivations, the samurai themselves display the tensions in the film at large.

As Ebert notes in his review of the film, Kurosawa’s “purpose was to make a samurai movie that was anchored in ancient Japanese culture, and yet argued for a flexible humanism in place of rigid traditions.” This is an excellent and succinct summary, although I sense a bit more ambiguity in Kurosawa’s purpose (or at least the results that purpose achieves): the humanism is subject to discipline, and I’m not entirely sure the ending deplores those rigid traditions. It seems more resigned to their existence (in this case, the division of social roles – the farmers in their place, the samurai in theirs). Put another way, the samurai world opens up to include outsiders but it’s sort of a one-way trap – once in, you can’t go out. The farmers can accommodate the samurai when they need them, but afterwards there seems to be no place for the samurai in the community.

Ultimately, the film is a celebration of “the project.” The project could be anything – a harvest, a jewel heist, a war, even a film production. In the project, individuals are allowed both to express and challenge themselves while also finding a larger purpose. Onscreen, the project is protecting the village from the marauding outsiders. The movie has a nominally “happy” ending in that the bandits are defeated, but four samurai are killed, the survivors seem lost and confused, and the villagers, while momentarily content in their harvest, have been said and shown to be miserable in their day-to-day lives. All of the film’s speeches reinforce this sense of life as difficult, unpleasant, frustrating, whether one is a bandit, a samurai, or a villager (one of the more humorous moments sees Kikuchiyo sneak behind enemy lines to confer with an unhappy bandit, who complains of his misery which Kikuchiyo, before killing him, promises will soon be over).

Yet in the execution of their plan, fraught as it is with danger and anxiety, there is a heightened sense of fulfillment. Though the movie may be seen as an individualist, humanist parable, and in some senses it is, it’s also consistent with the tradition of sacrificing oneself for a higher purpose, and finding bliss in the process. What separates Seven Samurai from earlier myths of this sort is its pointed ambivalence and clear-eyed view of how short-lived the greater project always is, indeed how short-lived it must be. It relies for its very existence on being exceptional, a departure from the norm. And of course, these great projects are fraught with horror: full of bloodshed and anguish, yet somehow the overwhelming quality of these emotions – at least as shown onscreen – in tandem with the focused, intense accomplishment of a goal, lends the project a sort of cathartic power.

Recently I watched the World War II classic Mrs. Miniver, and it serves as an interesting juxtaposition with Seven Samurai. There, the war is seen as something that must be endured, and the characters’ achievement lies in holding onto the spirit of peacetime amidst the perils of total war. There is a surreal quality to the movie, as the tidy bourgeois world is invaded by wounded Germans, ferocious bombardments, and propagandistic radio assaults. The movie was designed for American audiences, for whom this war-on-the-homefront notion was foreign and strange (the last war fought on U.S. soil was the Civil War). What seemed important was upholding the happy world of peacetime.

But in Seven Samurai, the world of peacetime is not seen as very happy, or very peaceful. In fact, to be entirely accurate, it doesn’t exist – even if the village is momentarily spared, a great civil war is raging across the land; so the idea of an assault is less strange than the idea of peace. In a world where total war is the norm, happiness is to be found not in preserving a myth of blissful nonchalance but in embracing the war spirit wholeheartedly, throwing oneself into the maelstrom, while clinging onto the staff of discipline by which one orients oneself. And only there can a sort of satisfaction and purpose be found. In that sense, the only ones who get a happy ending are the four souls beneath those burial mounds at film’s end, swords still standing defiantly upon the dirt while others look about them, wondering what to do next.

Tonight: The Seventh Seal

•
Before Christmas: The Searchers

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The Seventh Seal

December 26, 2011, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Taxi Driver

≪ Previous: Seven Samurai

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

In the Valhalla of cinematic images, alongside Orson Welles grinning through one doorway and John Wayne gripping his arm in another, next to Mickey Mouse conducting a symphony of waves or King Kong hanging from the Empire State Building, there must be a spot for a black-cowled, white-faced Death leaning over a chessboard opposite a stoic Crusader, against the backdrop of a stirring dawn over a stilled, glistening sea, contemplating his next move. When recommending first Bergmans for neophyte viewers, I always lean toward Wild Strawberries, since its lush atmosphere and modern story seem, on the surface, to make it the most accessible entry point into the auteur’s oeuvre. Perhaps if I were more honest with myself, I’d select The Seventh Seal, which was my first Bergman and made a great introduction to his work.

I hesitate for a few reasons: it’s grim and somber in its medieval setting, it could seem pretentious in its articulation of big, hefty themes, the emphasis on dialogue and the archetypal nature of the action and characters can make it seem too theatrical. Oh sure, I love it, but will someone new to Bergman? Yet these reservations tend to disappear on re-viewing, like the crusader’s depression on a brief sunlit afternoon. The film may be no picnic, but it’s hardly relentless misery – indeed, there may be more comedy than tragedy onscreen in terms of screentime. There’s intellectual wit, broad marital farce, lighthearted playfulness, and sardonic dark humor. This also cuts into the supposed pretension – when Death saws down a tree and an actor asks him what he’s doing, we’re confronted with the surprising immediacy of mortality, but we’re also chuckling (and we’re meant to chuckle)at the vague absurdity of the situation. The humor only adds an extra edge to the horror, makes it purer in a sense.

Finally, there’s the old “theatrical” canard. This always makes me uncomfortable. On the one hand, I suppose it can be a useful cudgel – take for example a lot of contemporary indies which seem content to have characters talk amongst purposefully static and distanced camera set-ups. To call this “un-cinematic” can serve as a convenient articulation of frustration and a useful reminder of the fact that art doesn’t need to be boring. Besides, since the early talkie era (and perhaps even before that, with the static “Famous Plays” silent movie which seemed content to record a performance without making any attempt at translation) filmmakers have had to be on the look-out for a complacent use of the camera, an over-indulgence in the writerly instinct (which from personal experience I recognize) to sit characters in a room and have them talk out their problems. Fine for the intimacy of a theater, not so great when there’s a celluloid or digital wall between you and the live action, and other tools are necessary to bring the material to life.

Yet at the same time, theater is undoubtedly one of the arts that informs film, as do painting, literature, photography, dance, music…to completely wall it off and be on a witch hunt against theatrical elements destroys a vital tool in the cinematic arsenal. Besides, there tends to be a bit of a double standard in how these rules are applied – as someone noted in a comment I read recently, the people who criticize Bergman for being “theatrical” rarely condemn Fassbinder in similar terms. I think ultimately what is “cinematic” or “theatrical” is hard to pin down in terms of technique; it’s more a matter of sensibility, manifested in technique to be sure, but in hard-to-pin-down ways. My Night at Maud’s, My Dinner with Andre, and The Mother and the Whore all - varying wide shots, mediums, and close-ups - film talking heads yet there is something fundamentally cinematic about them, something that just calls up the romance of sitting in a dark theater watching a larger-than-life screen (even if you’re watching them on TV at home). It could be the subtlety of the sound design or the naturalistic flow of the performances or the receptivity of the camera to its environments, making the silent scenery, inside or out, part of the action.

Returning to The Seventh Seal, it isn’t just the preponderance of dialogue that potentially make the film seem “theatrical” – it’s the broadly-drawn character types and the way situations unfold, which seems drawn more from the spatial limitations and compressed action of a play than from movies. Well, it’s no wonder – The Seventh Seal was a play before it hit the screen, though Bergman may have already had the movie in mind when he produced it on the stage (I believe he did). Yet the richness of The Seventh Seal lies in the way it fuses its theatrical and cinematic heritage, mixing the wife and the mistress so to speak (that was how Bergman distinguished his two passions – married to the theater, lustily romancing the cinema). Yes, characters talk for long stretches and certain elements, like the bawdy confrontation between cuckolded husband and vain lover, seem more at home in a play. At the same time, the movie is expressionist to the hilt, in a way only movies can be, using close-ups, music, and especially lighting to convey a dreamy cinematic sensual experience.

Later, in The Virgin Spring, Bergman would make something more purely “cinematic” and that represents a kind of growth, to be sure, but the detailed, loaded, information-heavy mise en scene and narrative (much like a medieval panoramic painting) has its own kinds of rich rewards. I love the boldness of this approach, and the iconic stature of the gestures, from a personified Death to a naively simple and contemporary (look at the clothing) religious vision to the desire to stuff in a bit of everything: witches, crazy cultists, crusaders, the Black Death, touring pageantry, tavern brawls, gloomy castles, moody wooded glens, sunlit fields, rocky beaches. The Seventh Seal is like a tour of the medieval imagination, limited in its parameters, crude in its scope, yet glistening with encrusted jewels and intricate flourishes. These bold, bigger-than-life touches also give the movie a kind of “cool” – it is intense and intelligent but, in a sense, not too sophisticated, which lends it charm.

Like Persona, The Seventh Seal grows in its impression the more Bergman films you see, especially the ones that came before. Though he’d had a few smaller hits, like Summer with Monika (a huge influence on the French New Wave) and Smiles of a Summer Night (his first international smash), The Seventh Seal was Bergman’s true artistic breakthrough, the film that made him a legend and established his persona for audiences in Europe and America. Yet it was his seventeenth film, and watching the others before one gathers both a sense of accumulation and a real sense of surprise, nonetheless, to see all the elements coalesce so strongly as they do here. One thing I noticed watching the film in this fashion was that the actress who plays the crusader’s wife was Inga Landgré, the star of Bergman’s directorial debut, Crisis. There she played an innocent girl launched into the world, inevitably corrupted and battered around by reality.

To see her here, standing by her hearth, not quite middle-aged but older and wearier than in Crisis, is to feel in a way we have come full circle, but in the sense of a spiral, looking down on where we were before. It’s a moving realization because, also like Persona, The Seventh Seal remains one of the key turning points in Bergman’s career. By casting the actress in this role, he is bidding farewell to the growing pains of his cinematic adolescence, a rich, rewarding, if sometimes stumbling phase, and launching into the period of his mastery. Oh, there will be pitfalls to come – some muddied experiments, a few half-hearted comedies, the misguided non-Swedish film here or there – but what heights! When the wife welcomes her crusader home, knowing that they haven’t much longer, when they read the apocalyptic Revelations and hear a knocking on the door, when Death dances off with them across the hill, it’s an end to be sure. But it’s also a beginning, and as the actors lumber off in their carriage, spared Death to face an exciting fugure, we are with them, just launching on a thrilling artistic voyage. Yeah, not a bad place to begin after all.

Tomorrow: Taxi Driver

•

This morning: Seven Samurai

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Taxi Driver

December 27, 2011, 4:00 am

≫ Next: The Third Man

≪ Previous: The Seventh Seal

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

The following was written in the fall of 1999, when I was 15 years old, just for the hell of it (not a school assignment). I'm including it because a) this title wasn't even originally scheduled in the series, but was added at the last minute, b) this series is in part about my personal relationship to these movies, and c) this film has a certain adolescent intensity (and I mean that in a good way), so it seemed appropriate to publish a review by the teenage me.

Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Robert DeNiro. Released in 1976. Also with Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, and Martin Scorsese. Written by Paul Schrader. Photographed by Michael Chapman. Produced by Michael and Julia Phillips. Themes - Alienation; Violence; Lust/reviewed on 9/11/99.

When I saw my first two Scorsese films, Mean Streets (1973) and Raging Bull (1980), I enjoyed them and was very impressed by Scorsese's directorial skills. But neither was satisfying. I don't mean satisfying in a way that makes [you] leave the theater or shut off the VCR with a smile on your face or even tears rolling down your face after a sentimental tearjerker ending. Sure, those experiences may mean you were satisfied. But for me, satisfaction means your emotions (deep emotions) have been triggered by the movie and this kind of satisfaction means you can finish the movie in an upset or depressed mood.

Now don't get me wrong. I consider Raging Bull to be one of the top films of the eighties, and Mean Streets thrills me because it propelled Scorsese to success and it's raw and often exciting. But this film, Taxi Driver, is one that grabs you and pulls you into the screen, as do few movies. The Godfathers (especially Part II) does this, as do Vertigo, Saving Private Ryan in some scenes, and the Star Wars films on a good day. What are the qualities that can do this? I've found that color film usually helps me to get pulled in. Truthful acting, not just line reading - in fact the less talking the better, helps too. Music can really get me involved. Finally, the direction must give me the key to unlock the movie's world.

Taxi Driver contains one of the all-time best performances ever given on film, and perhaps the most real: Robert De Niro['s]. De Niro was in the two Scorsese films I saw, and I've seen him also in Heat (1995), Analyze This (1999), Ronin (1998), Great Expectations (1998), and his classic performances in films like The Untouchables (1987), The Deer Hunter (1978), The Godfather Part II (1974), and parts of Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990), on TV. But he's never been like this before or after. Even in his best, best work (Deer Hunter, Raging Bull) De Niro always seemed to be holding back a little bit. I was never sure why: maybe it was the parts. But in Taxi Driver he's wide open. Not one fragment of the character is not exposed, or at least existing in De Niro's mind.

Not in one single frame can you see him acting (as you usually can in The Untouchables), at least not in the traditional sense. Scorsese let De Niro improvise, but he improvises in character, as Travis Bickle. De Niro is simply existing as Travis, not acting as him. This is true "acting." Everyone else is excellent, but it's De Niro, Scorsese, and writer Paul Schrader who rule the movie, with help from Bernard Herrmann's powerful score (was there ever another kind from him at his best?).

In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is a cab driver who is shut off from the world. He's a Vietnam veteran, but it's only briefly mentioned in the beginning. Still, it's very important to the story. Schrader and Scorsese seem to imply that Travis could only exist in a post-Vietnam world. Try to think of him in a buggy during the Victorian times or even in the thirties: it's impossible and highly unlikely, respectively. Travis writes yearly letters to his parents, telling them he's a government agent and cannot divulge more information; he says the same to Iris (Jodie Foster), a 12-year-old prostitute, who he wishes to save from her pimp (Harvey Keitel), who doesn't seem to be a sadist, but is certainly a pedophile.

Travis loves Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works for the campaign of a presidential nominee named Palantine. She rejects him after he brings her to a porn flick, and he tries to kill Palantine, but is foiled by the secret service, and runs away. That night, he goes on a killing rampage, slaughtering Iris' pimp, and various other lowlives who run the shabby whorehouse. Throughout the movie, Travis builds himself up, buys guns and practices with them, and even shaves his head into a mohawk. So at the end of the film, he is literally soaked in blood, both his own and that of those that he murdered. As the cops break down the door, Travis is covered with what must be mortal wounds. But in the ending sequences, we see newspaper clips covering the walls of his apartment, acclaiming his heroism. Then he picks up Bestsy in his cab and they part after she has briefly talked to him.

Roger Ebert has suggested that this is Travis' dying fantasy. I believe this fully. After all, look at the evidence: he's already been spotted trying to kill the presidential candidate. He's just murdered five or six people, mostly unarmed. And in the finale, we hear a voice-over of Iris' parents that says she has been returned to them, and they thank him. In real life, Iris would most likely just drift to somewhere else now that her pimp has been killed. Everything in the ending points to it being a dream: Travis is alive despite being shot numerous times in vulnerable places; he's chumming around with the other cab drivers; he hears that Iris is now safe; everybody loves him; he even gets to have revenge on the girl who broke his heart. This clearly must be his dying fantasy.

In fact, as he dies on the couch in Iris' room, he is holding his gun straight out between his legs. It's like Pauline Kael said: this is his version of sex, the closest he feels he can get. Finally, the movie ends with the decrepit streets of Manhattan as seen from Travis' cab. But Travis' reflection is no longer in the rear view mirror, as it was in the beginning of the shot. He's dead and he didn't change much after all. The city, the world, humanity, is the same as it always was and always will be, unchanged by him.

Tonight: The Third Man

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Yesterday: The Seventh Seal

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The Third Man

December 27, 2011, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Tokyo Story

≪ Previous: Taxi Driver

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend," E.M. Forster once wrote, "I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Albert Camus, faced with the possibility of his mother being killed by terrorists in the struggle for Algerian independence, said, "If that is justice, I prefer my mother." The circumstances in The Third Man - British officer Callaway tries to get naive American author Holly Martins to sell out his criminal friend Harry Lime, for the sake of Anna, a Czechoslovakian refugee - seem far more lopsided in duty's direction. Humanitarianism, rather than questionable nationalism, is set up against friendly loyalty, while the victim of justice is not a mother blown up on a tram, but a sociopathic greedy child-poisoner. Yet in a way, this only deepens the dilemma: the characters have every reason to betray Harry Lime, but one of them almost doesn't and the other never would.

As in The Quiet American, screenwriter Graham Greene stresses the extent to which moral fiber demands personal betrayal. It isn't just a matter of conforming to social standards, as in On the Waterfront where the characters are cowed by fear of the corrupt boss rather than personally loyal to him, and the anti-informing sentiment is an abstract principle - it's just something you're not supposed to do because, well, everyone says so. In The Third Man, it's more a matter of conscience - not conscience vs. society, or conscience vs. selfishness, but conscience vs. conscience. There's no ostracism awaiting Holly for playing "dumb decoy duck" (except that little bit Anna is able to offer, as her own back is up against the wall). A conversation between Holly and Calloway frames the issue succinctly: "We'll catch him anyway," Calloway smugly asserts, to which Holly responds, "Well, I won't have been a part of it." Sternly, Calloway counters, "That's a fine thing to boast about."

What's the trouble with Harry (who, in this case as it turns out, isn't dead)? His deeds are dastardly - diluting penicillin and killing or driving patients mad in the process. He offers no excuses, only cold-blooded rationales for his actions. He has witnesses and whistle-blowers murdered, perhaps killing them himself. Certainly, he's not one for personal loyalty: not only does he threaten to toss Holly out of a Ferris wheel, he aids the Russians in tracking down Anna, in return for their protection. In other words, he's a 100% scumbag. And yet - he is Holly's friend, and Anna's lover. Somehow, on some almost metaphysical level, that's enough. And, of course, it doesn't hurt that he's played by Orson Welles in what could very well be - amongst all the competition - the single most brilliant stroke of casting in cinema history. I can't imagine the part working nearly as well with anybody else in the role.

Not because we're sympathetic to Harry Lime, per se; we know he deserves what he's getting. Yet on some level we can't quite dislike him, not in a personal sense anyway. And we immediately see why Holly and Anna are so attracted to him - he's loaded with charisma and magnetism, witty, fun, a source of life. Them, on the other hand, we sympathize with yet we also recognize how helpless and lost they are without someone like Harry in their lives. One is just a foolish drunk hack writer, the other a melancholy, mopey girl, all too human (that's why they are poignant instead of pathetic) but with little to hope for in this dark postwar world. Harry Lime is life itself to them - so the question is at once existential (is loyalty as much a matter of conscience as duty?) and personal (maybe against their better instincts, the characters - and we - like Harry, we want him out there even if we're not around him personally).

In a series of lectures on existentialism, literature, and film, Hubert Dreyfuss places the characters within the framework of Kierkegaard's philosophy, with lower immediacy (following animal instincts), the universal (knowing what is right or just, and trying to obey it), and higher immediacy (knowing what is right and transcending it for something more important, in a "leap of faith"). In doing so, he poses an interesting question: why does Anna do what she does - or rather why doesn't she do anything? It isn't just that she refuses to betray Harry, even warns him: once he's dead she refuses to even acknowledge Holly. She won't betray his memory, let alone his person. Is she, in Kierkegaard's terms, a "knight of faith"? In a sense, yes - she has accepted as her central truth her relationship with Harry and refuses to let anything else intervene, not law and order, or sick children, or the truth about his meanness. It's too late, she has taken her leap. She knows that, defying logic or reason, she is to remain loyal to Harry to the grave and beyond.

Yet Dreyfuss contradicts this elsewhere, denying Anna this title and instead casting her as a knight of resignation - a knight of faith would believe, against all reason, that she would be reunited with Harry whereas Anna seems to accept his faked death, the revelation of his crimes, his traitorous re-emergence, and his eventual real death, all with equal stoicism, sad but moving on with her life - not expecting the happiness to ever flame up again. Both she and Harry are seen by Dreyfuss as beyond the ethical (Harry negative, she positive - sinner vs. saint) whereas Holly and Calloway embody the ethical (Holly negative with his vigilante sense, Calloway positive with his circumspection and responsibility). However, her religion is one of martyrdom and sacrifice rather than deliverance. Well, it's just one man's theory, and one I find unsatisfactory in some areas (I think his observations on Hiroshima Mon Amour are stronger) - I have trouble see why Anna should be pigeonholed when her grief seems to be a complex mixture of faith and resignation (and I think his reading of Holly is grossly simplistic).

However, I do find the questions fascinating and indicative of the rich moral texture at play. Anna is, in some ways, the most intriguing character in the film. Everyone else has fairly clear motives, with Harry and Calloway knowing exactly what they must do and why they must do it. Holly's choices are trickier, but his reasoning process is straightforward. Yet Anna remains an intriguing, elusive figure. We can understand her in the abstract - having loved and been grateful to Harry with a depth borne out of deep trauma and terror, she can never unstick herself from the psychological/emotional commitment she made in her time of desperation. Yet to actually leap into her mind, to feel what she's feeling, fills us with a bit of awe and confusion. It leads us to a point where somehow the tendrils of justice and equanimity lose their hold, and we fall into an abyss where all that matters is what grabs us in our gut (is this lower immediacy? higher? it's immediacy, that's for sure). It's a dangerous place - so many of the world's destructive ideologies or murderous pathologies have been born there - but it's an essential part of the human character and in its own way, almost rather noble. It's certainly necessary in some quality, and we can parse out where it should be limited or fenced in but once we do that we're already engaged in another kind of thinking or believing altogether.

Anyway, the ideas at play are not the first things that reach out and grab you in The Third Man. It's just simply one of the most entertaining films of all time - something I could probably put on anytime and fall under the spell of. It has three of the greatest scenes ever (maybe four, if you include the sewer chase) - if I was making a list of fifty or one hundred favorite scenes then the appearance of Harry Lime in the doorway, the Ferris wheel ride culminating in the immortal "cuckoo clock" speech, and that gorgeous closing shot would all show up, probably more entries than any other film could command. Yet The Third Man is not exactly a slick mechanism; the first time I watched it I was baffled - the jaunty music didn't seem to fit, the aggressively skewed angles were destructive, and the pace and banter were so fast. It wasn't the dark, moody noir I expected, or at least not only that. Eventually of course I came to adore the music and particularly its effect on the movie, and I realized that The Third Man is that mixture of light and dark, a world-weariness savored on a crisp afternoon day rather than in the dead of night.

This tone, this sensibility is - pace Anna - resigned but still committed, not believing blindly and foolishly nor cynically stepping back and giving up. It's believing in the struggle or the cause, whatever it may be, without having illusions. In a way, though they have come to different conclusions and can never be together again, Anna and Holly are on the same page. Calloway's done his job, Harry is dead, but Anna and Holly are still alive in a hostile world, dreamers who've realized that, while the world does not respond to the dream the dream doesn't cease to exist. Anna accepted to this long ago, and Holly is coming to comprehend it himself (though we don't believe that his romanticism will entirely evaporate, or with it his foolish and harmful gestures). Yet both of them - one by standing still, the other by striding past - are demonstrating their faith, flimsy as that falling leaf yet firm as those bare, spindly trees.

The Third Man appears at 6:30 in "Noir and Naturalism", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Tomorrow: Tokyo Story

•
This morning: Taxi Driver

↧

Tokyo Story

December 28, 2011, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Ugetsu

≪ Previous: The Third Man

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Shukishi and Tomi do not need money from their children. They don't need a place to live. They have their own home, and they seem comfortable enough in it - they even have a young daughter, an unmarried schoolteacher, who still lives with them. There is no crisis in their lives - no overt crisis anyway. This is, in a sense, the tragedy of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story: there is no great tragedy just simple sadness and disappointment, without catharsis or indignation to leaven the melancholy. In one of the film's famous exchanges, the youngest daughter, wearing an expression of strained frustration, asks her sister-in-law, "Life is disappointing, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," the other woman responds. With a smile.

That smile is quintessentially Ozu (no less because its worn by Setsuko Hara, the director's favorite heroine): stoic grace in the face of life's withering challenges. I've never seen Ozu as a "transcendental" filmmaker because his characters don't seem to overcome or transcend their obstacles; they simply endure them best as they can. This is a cinema of resignation. Yet it is far from bitter resignation, and indeed there is usually a kind of joy. The exceptions, like Tokyo Twilight, are exceptions across the board - outright tragic so that the lack of joy is not a subtle difference. With this in mind, it's a bit curious Tokyo Story is often featured as the masterpiece and/or token Ozu on any greatest-films list; indeed, I knew right away it would be among my "Big Ones" due to its reputation.

It's curious because Tokyo Story isn't tragic, at least not in the desperate, almost melodramatic terms of Tokyo Twilight, yet it mostly lacks the sense of joy or quiet bliss that other Ozus employ to temper the weary wisdom. Indeed, at times it does border on bitterness or at least a kind of depressive despair. Perhaps for the reason, it is not really one of my favorite Ozus, so I often wonder how it achieved the status it did (I find Late Spring his most engaging and moving picture). It could just be some issue of timing, but I think there are some fundamental reasons: for one, the film's theme is more universal than other Ozus - because it's about neglecting parents rather than arranging marriage (something which hardly pertained in the West by mid-century).

Furthermore, Tokyo Story has a kind of starkness which makes it stand out in Ozu's body of work - a bleak focus on the situation that marks it out from the other movies with their mixtures of quiet and conviviality, tradition and modernity, cheerfulness and sorrow. The old couple (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) seem lost and withdrawn throughout, their situation worsening but not fundamentally different from their arrival at their son's house in the beginning. Their only moments of true happiness come with Noriko (Hara), who isn't even related to them by blood - she's the widow of their son, who died in the war. Yet both the couple and Noriko are marked as outsiders so even their enjoyment seems shadowed.

Tokyo Story makes an interesting companion piece with Leo McCarey's 1937 Make Way for Tomorrow, which supposedly inspired Ozu to create his film. Both stories feature an old couple going to stay with their busy and impatient children, who view their elders as an imposition. McCarey's movie, while quite stark and honest within its context, is still very much a Hollywood movie with a stylized sense of storytelling and a heightened sense of drama. Ozu's film is far more consciously low-key; there are no real flare-ups or confrontations, tensions exhibit themselves more passively and the old man and woman rarely articulate their concerns (and only cryptically, with a sad smile, when they do). On the other hand, the children do voice opinions, continously - not so much to their elders, but amongst one another.

This is a very Japanese element to the story - it's as if the old couple, and perhaps Noriko as well, are trapped in the wrong movie. They believe in the values Ozu usually espouses, of acceptance and restraint and stoicism, while their children rush about restlessly, getting things done, and bluntly indulging their irritations and impulses. The oldest son, a doctor, has a no-nonsense bedside manner; he is never rude, but he is somewhat indifferent. The older daughter, a vain beautician, is rude - "frank" might be the term she would prefer; chatty and opinionated, she does not seem to have any inhibitions. The younger son is casually flaky, with a few good instincts which he overthrows at the first opportunity. The youngest daughter, the one who still lives at home has a good heart and is the only child who seems to really care about her parents but she is also naive and, in her own way, just as unrestrained as her siblings - as her bitter exchange with Noriko reveals.

Only Noriko, the war widow, shares the perspective of Shukishi and Tomi - which, paradoxically, leads her to make excuses for the less grateful and more brash children. Like the old couple suffering silently from their children's indifference, she quietly endured a difficult marriage to their dead son - this is another bond the three have in common, pain caused by the selfishness of the second generation. It's not as if these characters are simple saints. Noriko is embarrassed by Tomi's admiration, and is not the noble grieving widow they seem to think. She just has a sense of dignity. Shukishi, it is strongly hinted, was an alcoholic and even as an old man he gets stinking drunk and inconveniences his daughter. Sitting at the bar with his friends, we see him let loose for the first time, bemoaning his kids and indulging his whims. Perhaps there is a little of the father in the children after all - but the difference is that the father corrals and controls this impulse, channeling it into drinking nights instead of letting it define his whole life. This may not be a better solution but it is evidence of a desire, at least, for self-discipline and endurance.

Finally, the title of the film is notable in setting the tone and defining the mood: Tokyo Story - in other words a story not about the old values and traditions of the main characters, but the fast-paced, rather indifferent, modernizing and Westernizing world of the children. So even though we are with Shukishi and Tomi throughout (occasionally cutting away for elliptical revelations), we are as overwhelmed and frustrated as they are by the environment. This is one of the least harmonious Ozus I've seen, which is why it certainly is not archetypal (and perhaps why I find myself less attracted to it than others) but also why it is so interesting, why it stands out.

Most of Ozu's fifties film deal directly with the changing society, but they do so from a cautiously optimistic, or at least accepting, standpoint. Even the sad conclusion of Late Spring has a note of calm, peaceful surrender (besides, it is an old value, not a new one, which has triumphed). Tokyo Story lacks that standpoint - it is Ozu's most pessimistic film. The disappointed smile is the most we can hope for in a world that seems as alien to Ozu as to his heroes, however perfectly he captured it.

Tonight: Ugetsu

•
Yesterday: The Third Man

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Ugetsu

December 28, 2011, 1:00 pm

≫ Next: Last Call

≪ Previous: Tokyo Story

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

In discussing Rear Window, I wrote of Hitchock’s peculiar and attractive visual style, appealingly voyeuristic as we watch characters from afar, unable to see them closely yet fascinated as if by a child gazing on an ant farm or a dollhouse. I noted that the style was rare, although imitated or echoed at times by Jacques Tati, Jerry Lewis, and Wes Anderson. Always there’s a playful, tongue-in-cheek nature to this camera approach, a lighter-than-air quality that makes us grin ear to ear. Even in Rear Window, a tense thriller, the style is employed with a wink and a nudge.

Yet, in a way, Kenji Mizoguchi is doing something similar in his masterpiece Ugetsu, to very different effect. The camera stands back, observing the characters not with a melancholy detachment but a kind of helpless and stoic compassion. We watch in this way not to adopt the point of view of the voyeur, focusing in on a detail from afar, but rather to engage in a more omniscient perspective, a sensibility aware of human foibles and the terrible serendipity of circumstance yet unable to avert their course. The effect is less akin to a charming dollhouse and more like a brutally beautiful Brueghel, taking in the tragedy and the beauty in one unblinking gaze.

This is not to suggest a frozen, fixed viewpoint – indeed, the camera moves perpetually, with a heartbreaking grace, as it takes in the story of two peasant families, husbands seduced by dreams of wealth or glory while the wives struggle merely to survive. The light spreads subtly across the landscape, illuminating everything for our eyes. The agility and sensitivity of Mizoguchi’s (and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa’s) lensing leads us to another interesting contrast. Just as the film’s humanism is at once removed and immersed, so the swooping dollies and restless rises of the camera create a sense of freedom in a story that is about anything but freedom.

After all, the characters are essentially prisoners of fate. Genjuro and Tobei make poor decisions, and by the end have learned their lessons (in some cases, too late), yet they are portrayed as being obsessive, compulsive even in their pursuit of passion. Does it really seem as if Genjuro could responsibly say, well the pottery is important but our lives are moreso – let’s leave the kiln behind and save ourselves? Or that, once he sells his pottery in the village and encounters the enchanging Lady Wakasa (who turns out to be a ghost) that he could refuse her entreaties? No – he is enchanted by the specter of luxury and comfort provided first by the pottery and then by Wakasa. It’s an essential part of his personal fabric, and he has to learn the hard way its price.

Meanwhile, Tobei – whose adventures are portrayed a bit more comically than Genjuro – is the archetypal griping, grasping aspirant. He wants to be a samurai, rushing from his wife’s side at every opportunity until he finally stumbles across the head of a dead general; he's made a false hero while his wife, abandoned and abused, must become a prostitute. At no point is he shown hemming and hawing, holding back before giving in to his childish ambitions. It’s clear as day that he simply must become a warrior, even under false pretenses, and for him to act any other way would be like the scorpion not stinging the frog.

Yet all these twists of fate and doom-laden lures are represented through a visual style evoking liberation and deliverance. It’s as if we are simultaneously perceiving the characters’ compulsions objectively and subjectively – on the one hand, quite aware of how controlled they are by their destructive desires and whims, on the other tuned in to their own frequency, where it seems as if one is harnessing these ominous waves of fate rather than simply being swept up by them. As Tobei crouches in the brush and seizes his opportunity to kill an unsuspecting soldier, as Genjuro rolls through a gorgeously sunlit field with Wakasa, we feel their sense of adventure, romance, and excitement even as we acknowledge the illusion.

Meanwhile, Tobei’s wife Ohama is casually raped, the cruel chuckling soldiers tossing her money when they finish, leaving her to wail and curse her husband’s selfishness. Genjuro’s wife Miyagi is just as casually murdered on a forest path, the scraggly bandits tussling over her goods while she dies quietly in the foreground, a baby wailing on her back. Here Mizoguchi’s exquisite direction – the tilts, pans, dollies, and backtracks of his silent eye – are not meant to evoke dreamscapes or the glamour of illusion, but rather a deeper sense of transcendence. No illusion exists in these brutal moments, and yet a kind of spiritual wellspring is tapped – reminding us not only of our suffering but of the wider stage upon which we play, struggle, hope, and die.

Rear Window and Playtime do a marvelous thing: they create worlds. Ugetsu does something just as marvelous, while more moving and mysterious: it captures the world we live in, forgotten or obscured perhaps in our daily lives, but there underneath the transitory joys and pains waiting to be rediscovered by eyes as clear and a voice as mutely compassionate as Mizoguchi’s.

Ugetsu appears at 1:10 in "The Restless Fifties", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

In two days: Vertigo

•
This morning: Tokyo Story

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Last Call

December 29, 2011, 4:00 am

≫ Next: 100 of My Favorite Movies

≪ Previous: Ugetsu

Tonight or tomorrow, my final piece for "The Big Ones" goes up, on Vertigo, one of my two or three favorite movies. It will also be my last regular post for some time. On New Year's Eve, I will put up a revised version of my Top Posts to serve as the front page for this blog during a time of inactivity, a reminder to readers old and new of the site's potential as an archive.

Before I get there, I wanted to take a moment to do two things. One, as I did a few weeks ago, to highlight some recent posts - I have been putting pieces up more rapidly than ever before, so some stuff gets lost in the shuffle. These are the ones I think stand out, relatively speaking anyway.

Two, I wanted to take a moment - since I don't do it often enough - to say how much I appreciate your readership, whether you're casual or regular, a commentator or a lurker, fresh to the site or an old-timer. I suppose I would have been blogging even if no one was reading; for three years The Dancing Image was a very necessary outlet for me. But it's always reassuring to have an audience, whatever size. Thanks from the bottom of my heart - you made it feel worthwhile.

Here are some of the stronger recent posts. Check them out if you missed them before:

Schindler's List and Munich

The Third Man

The Passion of Joan of Arc

Metropolis ("The Tower of Babel")

Rear Window (& thoughts on Dial M for Murder)

Discussing The Rules of the Game

Persona

Blog 11

Avant-Garde: THE LEGENDS • FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART • WHAT'S IN A NAME?

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100 of My Favorite Movies

December 30, 2011, 10:54 pm

≫ Next: Vertigo

≪ Previous: Last Call

These are not necessarily the movies I consider "greatest;" they're closer to being personal favorites I would be most compelled to watch at a given moment. I've ordered them roughly by preference, though looking at the list it feels rather arbitrary...and of course, it could change in a minute or two. Links are to my reviews of the given film.

1. Masculin Feminin
(1966/France/dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
I just respond to the style here above all else - it's so restrained yet burning with intense energy. The movie is also a great example of the raw reality of documentary inflitrating a fictional story. And Jean-Pierre Leaud's internal monologue in the cinema is one of my favorite movie speeches ever.

2. Lawrence of Arabia
(1962/UK/dir. David Lean)
Although it's legendary as spectacle, the power of the movie lies in its fusion of character with landscape - geography as psychology. A perverse and violent adventure epic.

3. Vertigo
(1958/USA/dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
Simultaneously raw and elegant, this is Hollywood's masterpiece. Though I've seen audiences laugh along with it, it's startling for me to see it as at all comic (though like all Hitches, it has a sense of humor). The tragic, dreamlike aura seems overpowering.

4. Day of Wrath
(1943/Denmark/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)
This is a spiritual film to its core, even (especially) while exposing the crimes of organized religion. We are with our protagonist, but Dreyer doesn't let her off the hook either, and the conclusion could be seen as a reverse-miracle version of Ordet: the dark side of having enough faith.

5. The House is Black

(1963/Iran/dir. Forough Farrokhzad)

An intensely moving portrait of a leper colony; the most compassionate movie I've ever seen - at once a documentary and a poem, a physical survey and a subjective expression. The cinematography and editing are incredibly beautiful - not in a subtle, observational way but overwhelmingly so.

6. Still Nacht I-IV

(1988 - 1994/UK/dir. the Quay brothers)

The Quays are among my favorite filmmakes, with their eerie and penetrating stop-motion dreamscapes. Narrowing down one favorite is hard. This set of films, incorporating fairy-tale and erotic imagery into experimental shorts and music videos, is what I return to most often.

7. Gimme Shelter

(1970/USA/dir. the Maysles brothers & Charlotte Zwerin)

Maybe the greatest documentary feature - at once a perfect portrait of a zeitgeist, a canny examination of celebrity, and a meta-examination of the form itself. A truly visceral experience you'll find yourself thinking about later.

8. The Passion of Joan of Arc

(1928/France/dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer)

From the first second I'm hooked; Passion is as compulsively watchable a film as was ever created. Falconetti's otherworldly gaze and Dreyer's humanist and spiritual sensibility rivet one to the screen. A masterpiece of camera craft, editing, and performance - all of which seem inseparable.

9. The Godfather Part II

(1974/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

A shattered and shattering family portrait, with a moment that still gives me goosebumps: Michael Corleone embracing his brother while staring coldly in the distance, with ominous intensity. Probably the great American epic, with or without its predecessor.

10. It's a Wonderful Life

(1946/USA/dir. Frank Capra)

The story of America between the wars, mythologized but far from sugarcoated. Happy ending or no, this is a very dark national portrait but one with a deeply moral core, a morality of personal responsibility and instinctive empathy with the underdog.

11. Citizen Kane

(1941/USA/dir. Orson Welles)

Another national portrait, this one covering fifty years instead of twenty-five, and focused on the exceptional and lonely individual rather than the common man and his community. Also a joyride through the medium's possibilities and an anthology of divergent points of view. Brilliant.

12. Jammin' the Blues

(1944/USA/dir. Gjon Mili)

This performance short is the greatest "musical" ever made - a brilliantly orchestrated and executed jam session (staged, of course, but full of spirit) with everything you could ask for from music onscreen: dancing, singing, playing, that ineffable "cool." What a gem.

13. The Mirror

(1974/USSR/dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

I haven't seen this one for a while, but it lingers in my memory like a powerful, half-remembered dream. A mesmerizing fusion of documentary, personal memoir, fiction, experimentation, and found footage, all of cinema's possibilities are present in one magical work.

14. Taxi Driver

(1976/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)

One of the great subjective experiences ever put on celluloid. Scorsese, Schrader, and DeNiro make Travis Bickle at once the quintessential loser and an icon tapping into American myths of the romantic outsider, whether cowboy or Indian (see mohawk).

15. The Third Man

(1949/UK/dir. Carol Reed)

Three great scenes and no bad scenes - actually more than three great scenes, but the three best are so good they outshine everything else: a magical appearance in a doorway, a little speech about a cuckoo clock, and an achingly gorgeous long walk into the future.

16. Meshes of the Afternoon

(1943/USA/dir. Maya Deren)

A nightmare all the more frightening for being photographed in the light of day, and for having few jumpy moments of shock, just an overall lingering feeling of dread. However, the revelation of the mirror-face still causes a jolt, and the doom-laden conclusion anticipates Mulholland Drive sixty years later.

17. Star Wars

(1977/USA/dir. George Lucas)

Never before had the sheer bliss of kids' play been captured with such technical invention or attention to colorful detail. This is, in a sense, the only blockbuster; all others are superfluous.

18. The Nights of Cabiria

(1957/Italy/dir. Federico Fellini)

For my money, the warmest and most engaging Fellini, crackling with a wise romanticism and a sad realism, at once honest and magical. The sad, struggling, yet resilient Cabiria makes a poignant counterpoint to the cool cynicism of La Dolce Vita's Marcello.

19. The Godfather
(1972/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
The storytelling chops of pulp meet the moving pathos of great popular art, and an authentic American masterpiece is born. Fusing unblinking graphic content with a warmly romantic sense of style, Don Vito was right - I can't refuse.

20. Mulholland Drive
(2001/USA/dir. David Lynch)
Works both as a surreal excursion into the inexplicably uncanny, and a metaphorical dream dealing in rawly dissociated and displaced responses to a numbly painful reality. As always, Lynch turns subconscious currents into larger-than-life myth.

21. On the Waterfront
(1954/USA/dir. Elia Kazan)
Precisely the type of acting I find most appealing - not necessarily "realistic" (there's something heightened and playful about it) yet so natural, tapping into the emotional reality of a scene, repressing it, and letting it flow out of all the cracks in the facade. The Brando-Steiger scene is great but the tender romance with Eva Marie Saint is the heart of the picture.

22. The Virgin Spring
(1960/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Bergman's most cinematic film yet, a movie that moves through silence, space, and suggestion, evoking a medieval tempo and a primeval sensibility. A heartbreaking portrayal of doomed innocence and brutal revenge; Bergman dismissed it as "too Kurosawa" - if so, it's my favorite Kurosawa.

23. My Night at Maud's
(1969/France/dir. Eric Rohmer)
Francoise Fabian, mature, friendly, flirtatious, is irresistible, though Jean-Louis Trintignant tries his hardest to resist. A movie that perfectly captures the pleasurable passage of time in good company, while underpinning this joie de vivre with a compelling sense of moral dilemma.

24. Young Mr. Lincoln
(1939/USA/dir. John Ford)
Though it's difficult to choose between this and The Searchers as my favorite Ford, I lean towards Young Mr. Lincoln for its sheer surprise: such resonance from such simplicity. And it perfectly captures the ambiguity between down-to-earth charisma and canny demagoguery.

25. Mamma Roma
(1962/Italy/dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Contains what may be the greatest cut in cinema history. A hysterical mother leans against a window, barely restrained from leaping out, and the shaky frame is abruptly replaced by an ominously imposing cityscape. Mamma vs. Roma, and Roma wins.

26. The "Up" Series
(1964 - present/UK/dir. Michael Apted)
Easily the most fascinating movies ever created, because they capture a portion of that mysterious, almost alchemical process, whereby time passes and people age. At seven-year intervals, we watch a generation grow up and adapt themselves to society and circumstances.

27. The Searchers
(1956/USA/dir. John Ford)
Another archetypal American movie, one that seems to capture a certain essence of the American character - it's there in Ford's and John Wayne's instinctive brutality and equally instinctive grace. Muted poetry, pointed prose, incredible cinema.

28. Fists in the Pocket
(1965/Italy/dir. Marco Bellochio)
Savage and sensitive, this quintessential sixties film is at once black comedy, biting social satire, violent horror, and pure sensory experience. Subversive and romantic in its roving cinematography and jagged editing. And Paolo Pitagora - oh baby...

29. Goodfellas
(1990/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)
One of the most sheerly enjoyable films of all time, eminently re-watchable, at least if you can stomach the endless stream of violence, profanity, and drugs. Full of hilarious little details and frightening moments...no wonder it was so influential.

30. Red Hot Riding Hood
(1943/USA/dir. Tex Avery)
Another film that could be watched in a loop, and it's easy to do because it's so short and sweet. A horny exculpation of the fast-paced forties life which couldn't be represented in live action, this is a hilarious portrait of sexual frustration and an insanely clever fractured fairy tale.

31. Singin' in the Rain
(1952/USA/dir. Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
Sheer pleasure - not only highly imaginative song and dance, but a story that would make this one of the best comedies of all time, even if wasn't a musical to boot. The hilarious "Dueling Cavalier" fiasco could stand alone as a brilliantly subversive experimental short..."Yes, yes, yes! No, nooo, nooooo...."

32. Easy Rider
(1969/USA/dir. Dennis Hopper)
The movie doesn't get enough credit for its sense of humor, its raw power, and the impressionistic flow of its images and sounds - if there's a more kinetic use of cutting and pop music this side of Scorsese, I don't know it. And Nicholson's hilarious.

33. White Heat
(1949/USA/dir. Raoul Walsh)
A middle-aged Cagney turns in one of his most iconic performances as a ruthless killer with a mother complex, an itchy trigger finger, and a penchant for temper tantrums. The rugged scenery adds to the atmosphere and the explosive finale is just right...what a way to go.

34. Band of Outsiders
(1964/France/dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
Godard's greatest tribute to Hollywood (and acknowledgement of the gap between its aura and his own style). A thriller with one of the great musical moments and a number of winking western references. A girl and a gun - enough for a movie, if not (as it turns out) a successful heist.

35. The Man with the Movie Camera
(1929/USSR/dir. Dziga Vertov)
Sheer play, making every possible use of the camera and editing shears. Is it documentary? Fiction? Experimental? Home movie? All of the above, and pure movie through-and-through. As much, if not more, a sensory experience as an intellectual one.

36. The Gold Rush
(1925/USA/dir. Charlie Chaplin)
City Lights is the most iconic and perhaps perfect Chaplin, but this is the one that makes me laugh the hardest, and most involves me - who can't sympathize with the Tramp's humiliation at the mittened hands of Georgia Hale? Starvation, cannibalism and unrequited love have never been funnier.

37. Snow White
(1933/USA/ani. Roland Crandall)
Forget the Disney version; this is the fairest of them all. Stuffed to the gills with subversive imagery, clever details, and hilarious gags (hand-animated by Crandall over 6 months), this Betty Boop adaptation sends Grimm packing in favor of the marvelously sustained, rotoscoped brilliance of Cab Calloway.

38. Scarface
(1983/USA/dir. Brian De Palma)
Raw, garish, and trashy, perfectly capturing the eighties as a blood-red, cocaine-white, Miami-blue visual feast. DePalma, Stone, and Pacino are in (over-the-)top form.

39. Hyperballad
(1996/France/dir. Michel Gondry)
A music video that can stand with the great impressionistic shorts of all time. Gondry, through his trademark elaborate simplicity, evokes at once the sensations of dreaming, playing video games, and travelling through a strange landscape. Unforgettable images paired with Bjork's evocative soundscape.

40. Daisies
(1966/Czechoslovakia/dir. Vera Chytilova)
Wildly anarchic, here is a movie that captures the sixties in all its manic energy: playful, destructive, restless, apocalyptic. Chytilova claimed to be condemning the film's protagonists, perhaps to avoid official censorship (no such luck), but the stylistic bravado of this Czech classic is a gas.

41. Through a Glass Darkly
(1961/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Perfectly captures the melancholy, unsettling beauty of the isolated seashore as well as the tantalizing, terrifying madness beckoning on the horizon and whispering through the cracks of the wallpaper. Harriet Andersson is both hyperreal and ethereal, and the final revelation carries a horrific punch.

42. The Mother and the Whore
(1973/France/dir. Jean Eustache)
Talk, talk, talk, and cinematic to its core. The nervy energy and youthful restlessness of the sixties meets the ennui and world-weary disappointment of the seventies. An intellectual, sexual, and social exploration, this is the chamber drama as epic.

43. Rosemary's Baby
(1968/USA/dir. Roman Polanski)
Funny and terrifying, no movie better captures the claustrophic sense of paranoia - because we have no reason not to believe "all of them witches." Like Taxi Driver (even more so) a brilliant exercise in pure subjectivity. The ending is creepily hilarious.

44. Out 1
(1971/France/dir. Jacques Rivette)
Another exercise in paranoia, though this time it runs so deep you don't even know what you're paranoid about. There's no story to hook into exactly, just a relaxed yet alluring mood, an intriguing cast of characters and a series of immersive moments. One hell of an experience.

45. Chinatown
(1974/USA/dir. Roman Polanski)
No director better captures the frank charisma and brute power of evil than Roman Polanski. As Noah Cross sneers at justice, all the world seems a cruel, mocking Chinatown.

46. The Big Lebowski
(1998/USA/dir. the Coen brothers)
Looking for a lighter L.A. neo-noir? Already having sauntered from theatrical flop to cult favorite, Lebowski may be on its way to even greater glory - as both the Coens' masterpiece and one of the most brilliant comedies ever crafted. Made me laugh to beat the band.

47. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
(1992/USA/dir. David Lynch)
Speaking of flops, this was practically chased out of theaters by a lynch mob, less than two years after the TV series had been a smash. Too bad, as it both delivers on and utterly transcends the show's promise. One of the most upsetting and riveting movies ever made.

48. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
(1973/USA/dir. Sam Peckinpah)
The most recent addition to this list - I only saw it a week ago, but boy was it worth the wait. The scene at left: Wow. Screw the Bomb; this is Slim Pickens' greatest moment.

49. Murder, My Sweet
(1944/USA/dir. Edward Dmytryk)
The Stagecoach of noirs - not necessarily in terms of influence, certainly not for star power (Dick Powell is excellent, but Bogie - if anyone - was noir's John Wayne) but for its universe of archetypes. What a rich atmosphere, what an intricate plot, what a tough, streetwise sensibility! What a movie.

50. A Walk Through H
(1978/UK/dir. Peter Greenaway)
Wickedly bizarre and endlessly amusing and imaginative, this is one of the great avant-garde films. A guided tour through a gallery becomes some sort of metaphysical spirit quest, where ornithology, bureaucracy, and surrealism tangle, under the watchful eye of Tulse Luper.

51. Pinocchio
(1940/USA/prod. Walt Disney)
Going beyond the iconic mesmerism of Snow White, Disney and his animators create a rich world and pack the frame with character and invention. The imaginatively creepy Pleasure Island foreshadows the Disney Corporation's sinister evolution, but this time the magic still wins out.

52. Mean Streets
(1973/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)
The opening montage, with its fusion of home movies, filmmaking bravado, and the yearning beat and vocals of pop music - unbelievably brilliant. Scorsese knows, in his bones, how to craft kinetic cinema, and here grit and opera combust in glorious fashion.

53. L'Eclisse
(1962/Italy/dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)
This film has some sort of loose plot, but what it's really about is the strangeness of that water tower, the delicate shudders of those slender flagpoles, and Monica Vitti's gorgeous gaze at the strange new world around her.

54. 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968/USA/dir. Stanley Kubrick)
I love the boldness of the apes and the wiggy trip through the wormhole but ultimately what stays with me are HAL's queerly moving saga and that eerily elliptical white room, maybe the perfect essence of the "Kubrickian."

55. Historias Extraordinarias
(2008/Argentina/dir. Mariano Llinas)
If 2001 seeks out excitement in the far corners of the solar system, this movie reveals the extraordinary in the everyday. A warm-hearted Whitmanesque adventure, with no dialogue but continuous narration, Historias truly captures the spirit of good storytelling.

56. The Last of the Mohicans
(1992/USA/dir. Michael Mann)
More than just a good adventure yarn, this is a masterful exercise in form - with a climax that remains a masterpiece of rhythmic montage. Maybe Mann's masterpiece.

57. Casablanca
(1942/USA/dir. Michael Curtiz)
A romantic classic, to be sure, and an archetypal piece of brilliantly enjoyable Hollywod entertainment. But it also bottles a particular prewar and early-war sensibility of political commitment and underdog resistance; this put the dream factory on war footing.

58. Annie Hall
(1977/USA/dir. Woody Allen)
Another comedy that manages to be brilliantly witty, stylistically clever, narratively engaging, and laugh-out-loud funny - not an easy combination to achieve. Apparently crafted in the editing room and through reshoots, you'd think the wandering narrative was carefully planned, so perfectly does it hit every note.

59. The Decalogue
(1988/Poland/dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Through patient storytelling and seemingly simple yet carefully conceived visual approaches, Kieslowski creates an entire world, or rather ten whole worlds, overlapping but with their own centers of gravity and ways of seeing. Each story is powerful but the sum is greater than its parts.

60. Civilisation
(1969/UK/hosted by Kenneth Clark)
A groundbreaking history of art and civilization, this is a film which really opens up the wonders of the past - and a mostly passed perspective - for modern viewers. Traditional and eccentric, Clark's enthusiasm is contagious. As one fan said, he "makes you want to look at the stars."

61. Apocalypse Now
(1979/USA/dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
A wild, hallucinatory ride whose nihilistic worldview fuses Coppola's megalomaniacal grandeur, Milius' militaristic bravado, and Brando's mad insights.

62. Barry Lyndon
(1975/UK/dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Certainly a close contender for the most visually stunning film of all time, at least the most visually stunning landscape film (though actually its candlelit, NASA-lensed interiors are the equal of those exquisitely exposed hillsides). The last time Kubrick would take his camera so far afield.

63. 42nd Street
(1933/USA/dir. Lloyd Bacon, chor. Busby Berkeley)
The perfect backstage musical, capturing all the sweat, tears, and sexual tension and transforming them, through some kind of cinematic alchemy, into the most dazzling, inventive (and truth be told, theatrically impossible) musical numbers of all time...at least until the next Berkeley film.

64. The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946/USA/dir. William Wyler)
Quietly moving, this film deftly mixes the melodramatic traditions of Hollywood with a newfound sensitivity to postwar reality and realism, from the textured characterizations to the evocative small town setting to the deep-focus photography of Gregg Toland (leading to some brilliant compositions).

65. Au Hasard Balthazar
(1966/France/dir. Robert Bresson)
My first real "holy grail" film; after waiting five years, I was able to see it and was, inevitably, disappointed. Yet over time, almost out of that disappointment, I came to love it. Because Balthazar never asks for our sympathy, the film skirts sentiment and becomes perhaps the most authentically sad film ever made.

66. Rear Window
(1954/USA/dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
A movie about watching movies (or perhaps the new medium of television), cleverly disguised. What a marvelous little world was created outside that courtyard window, where romance and mystery unfold under orange skies amidst the bustling hum of the Village.

67. The Apu Trilogy
(1955-1959/India/dir. Satyajit Ray)
From the wondrously naive sensitivity of Pather Panchali to the formal sophistication of The World of Apu, this trilogy represents not only the growth of its protagonist but the development of a great filmmaker from his brilliant debut to his quick mastery of the medium.

68. Satantango
(1994/Hungary/dir. Bela Tarr)
Some movies create a world through the use of space, others through time. Satantango uses both, but especially time, luring us into a trancelike ambiance where the mundane and mystical intermingle - movie magic of the most unusual kind.

69. God's Country
(1986/France/dir. Louis Malle)
In the Midwest farm town of Glencoe, Malle discovers unique human truths and universal themes: love, loneliness, work, aging, death, family, rebellion, community. The documentary skirts condescension and sentimentality, without falling into either trap - what emerges is a small masterpiece of humanism.

70. The Seventh Seal
(1957/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Bergman's seventeenth film became his biggest breakthrough and created iconic images which linger still: a squirrel atop a tree stump, a silhouetted dance of death across a hilltop, and of course a game of chess against the sunrise. I love the boldness of Bergman's ambition.

71. Jaws
(1975/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg)
The mechanics of the film - its creation of suspense and use of spectacle - still impress, but it's the human drama (and comedy) that keeps me coming back.

72. Scarface
(1932/USA/dir. Howard Hawks)
That revelation of Tony Camonte in the barber's chair is a masterpiece of economy - to me, it says everything about the Hawks touch. And Hecht's screenplay is a classic: "Get out of my way Johnny, I'm gonna spit!" sprays "Say hello to my little friend!" with a hail of bullets and leaves it for dead.

73. Ivan the Terrible, Part II
(1946/USSR/dir. Sergei Eisenstein)
Lurid and decadent, this is one of the most bizarre big productions of all time. It pulsates with a kind of psychosexual energy, manifested in the craggy, expressionist sets, the distinctive Prokofiev score, Eisenstein's chesslike directorial conceptions, and Nikolai Cherkasov's baroque performance.

74. Gone with the Wind
(1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming & George Cukor)
I guess some people don't dig it, but how can you not? To me it seems the essence of Hollywood - glorious colors, larger-than-life characters, an epic story. There's irony too; as Mark Cousins notes in The Story of Film it's an escapist film whose narrative content explicitly condemns escapism.

75. Pandora's Box
(1929/Germany/dir. G.W. Pabst)
Nothing can quite prepare you for your first sight of Louise Brooks. She bursts into the room, long sleeves trailing behind her, smiling with a deadly lack of guile. No dramatic buildup is necessary; the force of her personal attraction leaps across the decades and through the screen to lure you to your doom.

76. La Roue
(1923/France/dir. Abel Gance)
Through a sense of montage that is more about accumulation than tension, Gance evokes a universe of passion, frustration, violence, and loneliness. With the sensitivity of his direction and the gusto of his technique he transforms potential melodrama into the stuff of Greek tragedy.

77. The River
(1951/India/dir. Jean Renoir)
And here we have one of the great dissolves in cinema history - from an older man, philosophizing about how death is a release from the burden of life to a young girl, sunk into grief; thus simply and subtly Renoir undercuts spiritual rationalization with simple human emotion.

78. Late Spring
(1949/Japan/dir. Yasujiro Ozu)
Every time you see it, something new strikes you - maybe the devastating apple peel at the end, or the crushing weight of the Noh performance (which often strikes Western viewers as tedious at first glance), or the poignant final sleepover at the resort. A film full of little truths that grow on you.

78. The Wizard of Oz
(1939/USA/dir. Victor Fleming & King Vidor)
A movie that, almost by accident, seems to contain everything: a childlike fairy tale, an all-American fable, a political allegory, a psychological code, a psychedelic experience, a dreamy invocation, a quintessence of elusive Hollywood alchemy. Even pulling the curtain on the wizard only deepens the mystery.

80. The Adventures of Robin Hood
(1938/USA/dir. Michael Curtiz & William Keighley)
Lavish Technicolor, giddy swashbuckling, hearty humor, Olivia de Havilland's beauty, Claude Rains' devious charm, Errol Flynn's jaunty swagger - and added to all these attractions, an eccentric plot twist gives Robin a refugee camp to run, bringing him up to date in a world consumed by war and fascism.

81. The Civil War
(1990/USA/dir. Ken Burns)
Though his approach has become somewhat formulaic since, this immersive, empathetic historical experience still feels fresh. The miniseries constantly makes the period vivid, reminding us, especially through astonishing sound film footage of veterans - that the war was not so long ago or far away.

82. The End of Evangelion
(1997/Japan/dir. Hideaki Anno)
Even knowing the preceding anime TV series, it can be difficult to make heads or tails of the avant-garde, apocalyptic imagery cascading across the screen in this feature follow-up. Nonetheless, it remains a mesmerizing visual experience and thought-provoking metaphysical exploration.

83. Syndromes and a Century
(2006/Thailand/dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
A dreamy meditation on the differences between city and country. Halfway through, the film radically transforms its texture, switching from the warm greens of a rural clinic to the cold whites of an urban hospital.

84. Raging Bull
(1980/USA/dir. Martin Scorsese)
Part gritty neorealism, part psychodramatic myth, Scorsese fuses disparate historical and cinematic traditions to produce a cold-blooded, hot-headed masterpiece of craft, one of the last great films of New Hollywood. The fight scenes remain expressionistic classics.

85. Schindler's List
(1993/USA/dir. Steven Spielberg)
By choosing an uplifting story about a historical tragedy, and by telling this story in a gripping and entertaining fashion, Spielberg invited criticism - but these potential flaws are also the film's great strengths, along with Ralph Fiennes' mesmerizing, terrifying performance.

86. Miraculous Virgin
(1967/Czechoslovakia/dir. Stefan Uher)
A poetic Slovakian masterpiece about war, art, and the power of beauty - full of surreal touches, conveyed especially through the movement of the camera rather than aggressive editing or Kafkaesque narrative devices.

87. Platform
(2000/China/dir. Jia Zhangke)
A brilliant depiction of China's rapid transformation from Maoism to capitalism, provincialism to globalism, tradition to rootlessness. Throughout mobile tableaux, little details (a hairstyle, a song on the radio) accumulate until nothing remains the same.

88. Place de la Republique
(1974/France/dir. Louis Malle)
On a day like any other, Louis Malle and his camera crew enter a public square and begin filming and interacting with the people they run into. Before long, fascinating stories and amusing personalities emerge: cinematic intrigue naturally arises from the everyday.

89. Stop Making Sense
(1984/USA/dir. Jonathan Demme)
Through a concert film so carefully (yet subtly) staged as to rival the biggest Hollywood musicals, Talking Heads offers both a captivating performance and a sly narrative about a loner joining a community. David Byrne must be seen to be believed.

90. Cria Cuervos
(1976/Spain/dir. Carlos Saura)
Ana Torrent gives an incredible performance as a little girl whose resentment of her father leads to a mixture of confused guilt and murderous pathology after he dies. Shot around the time of Franco's death, this is psychological drama with political implications.

91. Faust
(1926/Germany/dir. F.W. Murnau)
Giddy with the inventiveness of its images, this Expressionist classic finds time to both evoke the iconography of the Middle Ages and playfully indulge in pastoral romances and farcical roundelays. The tone shifts repeatedly throughout, soaring through epic, horror, romance, and comedy before its dramatic conclusion.

92. Emak-Bakia
(1926/France/dir. Man Ray)
Ray captures a fluidity already suggested by his photographs in this experimental short, objects, people, and abstract images shift and transform before our eyes; anticipating Vertov by a few years, Ray even shows a camera-eye. Self-conscious perhaps, but this is an exercise in pure sensation.

93. All the President's Men
(1976/USA/dir. Alan Pakula)
A moody, evocative thriller, low on violence yet high on tension and atmosphere. Pakula's mazelike sense of intrigue, William Goldman's compelling mind-puzzle screenplay, and Gordon Willis' shadowy photography evoke a tangled world of corruption.

94. Death by Hanging
(1968/Japan/dir. Nagisa Oshima)
Caustic, clever, and finally, almost surprisingly, compassionate, Oshima's satirical masterpiece centers on a Korean criminal who, physically, simply can't be executed. Surrealistically investigating and re-enacting the crime, the officials end up implicating themselves.

95. Persona
(1966/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Images and strange dialogue stream forth from Bergman's subconscious, disciplined by two decades of filmmaking experience yet raw with the urge to communicate an elusive experience. Whatever you make of the strange sequences, they carry a kind of dreamlike charge.

96. Dogville
(2003/Denmark/dir. Lars von Trier)
Perverse, exhausting, and exhilirating, von Trier's theatrical-yet-cinematic approach & stripped-down sets create a captivating if cruel emotional reality.

97. Celine and Julie Go Boating
(1974/France/dir. Jacques Rivette)
A film that stubbornly evolves its own logic: two young women trespass in a house that seems to exist in a parallel universe - or a parallel movie. They begin to interfere with the drama that unfolds there, abandoning their own narrative to play around in another.

98. Lost in Translation
(2003/USA/dir. Sofia Coppola)
Snobby? Self-centered? Perhaps. But is the film as "boring" as its legion of detractors seem to find it? Quite the opposite: I know few movies so absorbing. If you tune into Coppola's frequency, every moment is pregnant with a mesmerizing, melancholy mood.

99. La Haine
(1995/France/dir. Mathieu Kassovitz)
A joyride and a cri de coeur, La Haine brilliantly varies between long-take, static-shot dead-time and explosively kinetic camera movements and cuts - the characters' only relief arriving via confrontation with the cops or the sonic deliverance of hip-hop.

100. La Vieja Memoria
(1979/Spain/Jaime Camino)
This documentary on the Spanish Civil War is mostly talking heads - yet somehow this only adds to the fascination and the human drama. The title is Spanish for "that old memory" and, watching these faces forty years after the main event, it's as if we are digging through the sands of time, excavating what remains of the truth.

Many of these films were featured in my video series. Visit Cinema in Pictures to browse video clips by title.

This is a Top Post. To see other highlights of The Dancing Image, visit the other Top Posts.

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Vertigo

December 31, 2011, 3:54 pm

≫ Next: Explore The Dancing Image - TOP POSTS

≪ Previous: 100 of My Favorite Movies

This concludes "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

I was very lucky with Vertigo.Psycho had been spoiled for me when Iwas far too young to see it; by my first viewing, I’d already seen clips of not onlythe shower scene but the climax. A schoolmate told me who Luke Skywalker’sfather was after I’d viewed the first StarWars, a friend’s father revealed Rosebud’s identity a minute or so beforeit appeared onscreen, and I discovered the real Keyser Soze prior to watching The Usual Suspects. Yet I didn’t knowwhat to expect when I slipped Vertigointo the VCR. I didn’t even know that there was a twist in store, let alonewhat that twist would be.

I was thirteen and had already seen The Birds (I found its long melodramatic set-up boring) and Spellbound (which, true to the title, transfixed me with its psychological mysteries and eerie atmosphere). Iknew that Hitchcock movies generally had mysteries, that they were full ofsuspense and tension. However, when Madelaine fell off that tower, as far as Iknew the movie was over. I hoped it wasn’t – I was eagerly anticipating somesort of surprise or further revelation, and was so wrapped up in itsfeverish atmosphere that I didn’t want it to end. And, sure enough, it didn’t.

Fifteen years later, I must have seen the film at least adozen times. Since those early days, I’ve watched every Hitchcock film except the ones after The Birds (these remaining peaks will beconquered in the coming weeks) and all the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” episodeshe himself directed, up to Vertigo.I’ve seen Vertigo with friends, with relatives, numerous times by myself.I’ve relished showing it to people who – like me – came in unprepared. I’veattended screenings in a small library with a mostly older audience, chuckling throughout (perhaps primed by youthful viewings of the TV show, theywere inclined to see Hitchcock as inherently comic). I remember being baffled;I thought the movie was an out-and-out tragedy.

I watched the movie with a younger audience as well; in highschool the cross-country coach would often play classic films during thelunchbreak. This usually didn’t go over well, and this time was no exception – mypeers sniggered at the plot holes and the older style of acting, and grewrestless at Hitch’s glacial pace during the “following” scenes. I was theirage, of course, but in high school I loved this movie perhaps more than anyother – its only close competitors were Lawrenceof Arabia, The Godfather, and Taxi Driver and on most days, itoutpaced them all. Like Taxi Driver,it had an adolescent intensity and a deeply subjective point of view (whatteenager doesn’t think they’re the center of the universe?).

However, that subjectivity subtly shifts throughout andwatching the film again today I’m struck by how quietly aware the screenplayand direction are of other perspectives. Driving around with Scotty as hefollows his friend’s wife, floating along with Bernard Herrmann’s hypnoticscore, we find ourselves immersed in a trancelike identification with Scotty’sgaze. And yet frequently Hitchcock lingers on Scotty’s unfortunate femalefriend Midge, most memorably when she tries to paint herself into Scotty’s lovelife and ends up feeling foolish. We view Madeleine as a mystery but later,when we learn she’s Judy, we go back and watch the movie, trying to tease outwhere performance ends and personality begins. Where can we see thefrightened actress peeking through the façade of the icy blonde?

And of course, halfway through the movie, Hitchcock pullsthe curtain altogether. It’s an interesting move, and I still wonder what thefilm would play like if the story took a different tack. How would we viewScotty’s grooming of Judy if we didn’t know she who she really was? Or what iflittle clues had been planted, so that we suspected her identity (the flashbackfollows a scene which very convincingly dispels any suggestion of continuity)but couldn’t quite figure out how this was the same woman Scotty had fallen inlove with? All intriguing possibilities, but the boldness of this stroke givesthe film a tantalizing ambiguity, complicating its subjectivity.

As in Psycho, wehave switched the character we identify with. In Psycho the switch happens relatively early in the film, so we canmake a complete break and mentally shift gears, startling as it is. In Vertigo, however, we’ve basicallyalready watched an entire movie and we can’t totally abandon Scotty. This structure is very unusual; I can’t think of many others films which end their plot but continue their story, eventually inventing a new plot to carry the weight. Vertigo effectively concludes after an hour and fifteen minutes – this iswhy I sensed, with some anxiety on first viewing, that the movie could end atany point. Yet it keeps going. Nothing prepares us for that continuity (nothingaccept our expectations that Hollywood films will emotionally resolvethemselves) and this gives the rest of the movie a kind of uneasy, freefloatingfragility.

By the hour-and-a-half mark, we’ve soared free from the constraints of amechanical plot – or inverting that understanding, we’re being sucked into awhirlpool in which emotional intensity grinds up the narrative boat carrying us across the churning water. Judy’s letter gives us another narrative hook – now we havesomething to anticipate – but its shock and the film’s accumulated emotionalbaggage keep us from getting too involved in any “plot”: now the film is purecharacter. Indeed, when the film concludes a second time it hasn’t emotionallyresolved anything. It has “solved”the plot – now Scotty knows the truth, and Judy is dead so their relationshiphas nowhere else to go (her death has a random, what-else-do-we-do-now? feel asif it’s anticipating the violent endings of so many sixties films).

Yet at this point we don’t really care about the plotanymore. Indeed, notice how nobody brings up the police or Gavin or poorMadeleine except inasmuch as she served as a catalyst for their personaltraumas. The law and morality are not at stake, what’s at stake is thecharacters’ psychological well-being. This can never be resolved, except bydeath. To the extent the movie has a consistent arc from beginning to end, it’sScotty’s agoraphobia, but this is one of Hitchcock’s most transparentMacGuffins to the point that it doesn’t even serve as an audience hook after awhile. Most people wouldn’t even remember that by film’s end Scotty is “cured”of the problem that assailed him in the first scene. Yes, there he is standingatop the bell tower, looking down without fear. Whoopdedoo – he’s just lost thelove of his life. Again.

The movie is remarkable for both mystifying and demystifyingwomen. We are as subject to Scotty’s yearning awe for Madeleine as he is:Hitchcock presents her from afar, the voyeur’s perspective, and even when she’sin a bathrobe in Scotty’s apartment she’s cool and distant, the ultimateHollywood glamour queen. Occasionally, Scotty leers at her, as if they’ve justbeen to bed but they haven’t – he merely changed her clothes and tucked her inafter she “fell” into the San Francisco Bay. Scotty’s persona in relation toMadeleine and Judy is complex - he sees himself as Madeleine's protector and Judy's Svengali but he's a victim in the first case and a dupe in the second. While feeling the pain of his own loss and confusion, he doesn't seem to notice the suffering he causes in others.

Scotty adores the ideal and seems to be indifferent to thereal person underneath (he’s apparently satisfied by Judy’s cosmetic changes asif making love to Madeleine’s body is equivalent to restoring her soul). Thisis why the revelation of Judy’s identity is so brilliant – on the surface we’dexpect it to make us sympathize more with Scotty, knowing that he had the woolpulled over his eyes, but instead it makes his behavior seem stranger and morecontrolling. Because we know Madeleine lives, that indeed she’s right underScotty's nose, we’re less inclined to pity his obsessive need to reshape reality.Hitchcock, as ever, brilliantly knows how to guide the audience’s attention: wemay congratulate ourselves for breaking the spell and discovering the idealizedwoman’s humanity but how often do we think about the fact that she’s anaccomplice to murder? We have merely switched or complicated our subjectiveviewpoint – we haven’t discovered an objective one.

When thinking about Scotty’s obsessive, overpowering desiresand frustrations, a few literary antecedents come to mind. One is Fitzgerald’sGatsby: "Can't repeat the past?...Why of course you can!" Yet Scotty is no naive, almost childlike believer ala Gatsby - he knows the pain, and the permanence, of loss and failure. That's why the other literary figure is Kierkegaardwith his veneration of the “knight of faith.” Here he is in Fear and Loathing: "I believe nevertheless that I shall get her, in virtue, that is, of the absurd, in virtue of the fact that with God all things are possible." If Scotty believes in God, he never lets on; Hitchcock's universe is full of Catholic guilt but without its opposite - the atmosphere is charged with a kind of spirituality but no divine being, and Hitch's God is like Bergman's, either absent or malevolently offscreen. Yet Scotty does believes wholeheartedly in the absurd, not intellectually but intuitively. This is why he keeps making Judy over and over, superficially that it won't really transform her into Madeleine, yet somehow believing deep down that it will.

And, astonishingly, Judy does "transform" into the real Madeleine - had Hitchcock thrown out the letter-writing scene (as he almost did; it wasn't in the novel and he second-guessed himself in post-production) the revelation of the necklace would have seemed even more like a sort of transubstantiation, as if through elaborate ritual a spirit had been reawakened. In another sense, since Judy was the real one all along, this is the scene in which Madeleine finally dies, or rather ceases to exist - ceases to ever have existed. The struggle on the stairway is striking in part because for once there's no music playing; the demystification is complete and we're left only with the stark lighting and Scotty's sneering, shouting vocal delivery. The trance is broken. Yet even knowing what we know, we keep coming back to Vertigo, and keep falling under its spell. That's because in a sense, at least when it comes to movies, Gatsby and Scotty are right: you can repeat the past. Our knowledge transforms what we see, yet the visceral pull remains, and once again we find ourselves gliding after a spirit. Because Scotty believes in the myth of Madeleine, for the moment the truth of the lie, the reality of the myth, remains. Judy's reality emerges, but it does not destroy Scotty's.

If cinema teaches us anything, it's this: there is no such thing as false consciousness.

Vertigo appears at 3:15 in "The Wide View", a chapter in my video series "32 Days of Movies".

Yesterday: Ugetsu

Here are some more pictures from "Vertigo":

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Explore The Dancing Image - TOP POSTS

December 31, 2011, 7:24 pm

≫ Next: Dishonorary Awards: Why Not to Watch the Oscars This Year

≪ Previous: Vertigo

This is a collection of my strongest work. It will top the blog as I take a break from the site.

Welcome (or welcome back) to The Dancing Image. There are several ways to explore the site, beginning with the video clip series "32 Days of Movies." With selections from my collection, I created a tour through a century of cinema, from The Cameraman's Revenge (1912) to Antichrist (2009). Click on this icon to browse the films included, or visit the video gallery to peruse chapters.

As for the rest of the site, I can point you to the movie timeline for a chronological overview of all films covered on The Dancing Image, or the directory for an alphabetical archive of all my reviews and other miscellaneous pieces. You can also visit the picture gallery to scroll through great images from the past three years; click on any picture to visit the post in question. My annual blogger round-ups offer a wider view of the blogosphere, starting with the 2011 tribute. Finally, though it's linked below as well, I'll point you to one of my last posts of the year in case you missed it: a list of 100 of my favorite movies.

TOP POSTS

This post's primary purpose is to highlight some of my work, whether prose essays, image-only visual tributes, or even the occasional video piece. I've copied my "Top Posts" page here and split it into five categories ("Essay" - "Video" - "Mixed Media" - "Image" - "List").

I hope new visitors will come across these selections first. They advise saving the best for last but as a wise man once said, I subscribe to the law of contrary public opinion...

Essay

The Big Picture: The Movies and Me

A memoir, a confession, a manifesto, a declaration of principles...

Boomer Baseball: Field of Dreams & the 60s
Field of Dreams seen through the prism of 60s nostalgia and baby-boomer mythology

Citizen Kane

An analysis of how each narrator subtly shifts the tone and style, both cinematic and narrative, in this celebrated masterpiece - including comparisons to the work of painter Thomas Cole

Flight of the Red Balloon
A review of the French film, exploring its relationship to the earlier Red Balloon and the French New Wave; this kicked off my 'Best of the 21st Century?' series

Hooray for (Hating) Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard
A review of Sunset Boulevard which concludes my series on early 50s films dishing the dirt on the film industry

Lawrence of Arabia
An essay on one of my favorite films, celebrating its expression of personal psychology through epic landscapes

Let Them All In... Let the Right One In Book/Movie/Remake
History of all the different versions of Let the Right One In, a film about a teenage girl vampire and her strange friendship with a lonely little boy

The Magnificent Ambersons
Observations on a massacred masterpiece, and how the studio's cuts actually reflect the very theme of the movie: the descent from elegance into the mundane

Summer Hours (Best of the 21st Century?)
Review of the French film about a family letting go of their country home - maybe my strongest piece for the 'Best of the 21st Century?' series

The Sunday Matinee - Before the Revolution
Bertolucci's hard-to-find classic, about a romantic young man who struggles with his Marxist beliefs and sleeps with his aunt, gets the 'Sunday Matinee' treatment, as part of my series on 60s New Wave cinema

This Sporting Life, Billy Liar, and the British New Wave
Historical overview of the British 'kitchen sink' films of the 1960s, focusing on two films which came out in 1963 and represented a profound shift in the movement

Triumph of the Will
Reflections on Leni Riefenstahl's powerful and disturbing Nazi propaganda doc

Twin Peaks: Lonely Souls & Beyond Life and Death
Write-up on two climactic 'Twin Peaks' episodes (the revelation of the killer, and the finale), entries in my series on the TV show

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
After watching this movie (the prequel to the TV series), I wasimpressed, upset, and uneasy with what I'd seen, and I wrote this review

Waiting for the 25th Hour
Seven years after the movie came out (and at the exact time the main character would be getting out of prison) I revisit Spike Lee's 25th Hour, one of the few films to deal directly with 9/11, for the 'Counting Down the Zeroes' series

The Way We Weren't: Art Under Bush
Polemical response to Newsweek's shallow 'Art in the Bush Era' piece, reflecting on the culture and politics of the past 8 years - this one came straight from the gut

The Wind in the Willows - Dulce Domum • Toad Hall
The two strongest pieces in my Wind in the Willowsseries, using images from the various film adaptations to illustrate myobservations on Kenneth Grahame's classic book; 'Toad Hall' exploresthe setting in light of British economic history, while 'Dulce Domum'relates Grahame's personal biography to the book's theme of 'home'

Video

32 Days of Movies - "To Become Immortal, and Then, to Die." • "Reality Cinema"
Nineteenth and thirty-first chapters in video series - one closes off the sixties epoch with a bang (including a lightning fast montage featuring 60 years of cinema in 40 seconds) and the other scans the zeroes, with its mixture of documentary and impressionism

Astaire and Rogers
Video clips of every single Fred & Ginger dance number

directed by Brian De Palma
A video tribute to the dark fusion of sex and violence in the director's cinema
This is the one piece I am proudest of.

The Musical Countdown - 42nd Street
Accompanied by an essay, this 5-minute video examines the narrative & stylistic sweep of the Busby Berkeley classic

Mixed Media

Cities of the Imagination
A prose/image reflection on city dreams, using Carl Jung, the Chinese film The World, Michel Gondry's music videos, and my own memories

The Great Movies
A tribute to one of my favorite movie books, an obscure, out-of-print coffee table tome discovered in childhood and relished ever since; includes many scanned images from the book itself

The Musical Countdown - The Gay Divorcee

Entry in Wonders in the Dark musical countdown explores the 'Night and Day' number through Arlene Croce's prose & images from the film

The Social Network
Musings on The Social Network, presented in the form of a Facebook page

Two Things We Know About Pictures
Impressionistic tribute to Pierrot le fou, using Godard's famous quote and images captured from the film

Image

Civilisation in Pictures
The great works of Western art, captured in images from the wonderful British TV series

The Corruption of Michael Corleone
The descent of a character into darkness and evil, told using only images from the Godfather films

The Fall and Redemption of Anakin Skywalker
An an image-only representation of Darth Vader's trip to the dark side

Shaking the Foundations
Enticing images from the fantastic Italian film Fists in the Pocket,a sixties touchstone about the ultimate dysfunctional family; thevisual tribute concludes with one of my all-time favorite quotations, aprofound statement on the film and its times

The Singer Not the Song
Beautiful images captured from 'The Nightingale,' based on a Japanesefable, aired for Shelley Duvall's 1980s TV series 'Faerie TaleTheatre,' starring Mick Jagger in yellowface

Syndromes and a Century
Images of city and country, green and white, warm and cold, in tribute to a great Thai film

Top of the World
A visual tribute to Rocky's triumphant morning run

List

100 of My Favorite Movies

One hundred films I love, with a picture and brief capsule for each

The Director's Chair
My 32 favorite directors, represented by evocative title cards and clips from their work

A dirty dozen
An imaginary lineup of double features, arranged thematically into sixcategories: 'Their Town,' 'Secret Societies,' 'She Did It Her Way,''Rising to the Top,' 'By Airplane or Submarine,' and 'Movement, Music,and Montage'

In the Beginning...
Nine great 'opening' images from movies - meaning these are the veryfirst visuals we see onscreen; this post also kicked off an active andlively 'picture gallery' meme, and the other entries are listed at thebottom

Just because you are a character, doesn't mean you have character... Part 1 & Part 2
Two posts, taken together comprising 100 favorite characters in film history, from Nosferatu to King Kong to Mrs. Robinson to E.T. to the Dude

Reading the Movies
My ten favorite movie books, with the stories behind each one, fifteenrunners-up, and an invitation for other bloggers to participate (theydid)

The Restoration: Glimpses of the Past - and Future?
A smorgasboard of screen-caps, stills, and posters from unavailable films, in tribute to the 'Film Restoration' blogathon

Shine on You Crazy Diamonds...
20 headshots of my 20 favorite actresses

They Once Were Coming Attractions... (memories of my movie past, 1988 - 1998)
Sheer nostalgia, but something many of my generation (born circa 1983)will share - a lineup of movie posters from everything I saw intheaters between ages 4 and 15

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Dishonorary Awards: Why Not to Watch the Oscars This Year

February 20, 2012, 5:00 am

≫ Next: Lost and Found - and Back in Action

≪ Previous: Explore The Dancing Image - TOP POSTS

By refusing to broadcast the Honorary Awards for the third year running, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has blown a raspberry at the luminaries of film history. Perhaps we should return the favor.

(originally appeared on 2/21/11 - still relevant, unfortunately)

This is not a clever list of "Top 10" reasons to ignore, criticize, or make fun of the Academy Awards. Right now I'm only interested in one deeply unfair and indicative reason. That said, a brief bit of background may be in order.

ORIGINS AND INTENTIONS

About eighty-five years ago, the Academy was established as a studio-run guild - the producers were seeking to stem trade union growth within the film industry. The awards ceremony was one of the group's earliest gestures, so from its very formation there was a top-down, conformist nature to the awards, an element of condescension as the bigwigs patted their underlings on the head. Though the members themselves were voters, votes were cast within a context created and facilitated by the industry's elite. However, this also meant that the Academy expressed Hollywood's view of itself at the highest levels.

Over the years, for better or worse, the Academy has become, if not a beloved institution, at least a widely influential and famous organization. People pay attention to its actions - and the ripples produced by the Academy Awards can ultimately have a tsunami effect on the public's perception of movies and the movie business. Over time, the Awards ceremony has, in addition to honoring the favored films of a particular year, established and maintained a vital link between different periods in its own history.

HOLLYWOOD HISTORY

Through enjoyable and well-intentioned (if often cumbersome) montages, and more importantly through the presence of living and deceased legends and icons on the ceremony's stage and screen, past Academy events clearly implied some continuity between cinema's past, present, and, presumably, its future. Certainly there are questionable undertones to these gestures: does the present live up to the past (and do latter-day celebrities deserve to ride their predecessor's coattails)? And from the other side, is history being over-idealized in the Academy's gauzy nostalgia?

Maybe so, yet ultimately these tributes were important and valuable - particularly the Honorary Awards, which could rectify past oversights or snubs (think Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, receiving special achievement awards at the end of Best Director-free careers). In an environment where intense marketing, profit margins, and the hype machine determined what "matters," space was created for the vital traditions and accomplished figures of film history, many of whom were unjustly ignored by the Academy in their prime.

NO HONOR

Hindsight is 20/20 - one reason the roll call of such trophies is more illustrious than a list of actors and filmmakers awarded for contemporary films. Look at 2010, for example. Honorary Oscar recipients included historian Kevin Brownlow, actor Eli Wallach, and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (arguably the greatest living director). They were bound to outshine just about anyone else holding a trophy at night's end.

The same was true of Thalberg Award recipient Francis Ford Coppola, responsible for some of Hollywood's greatest triumphs - you'd think if anyone deserved center stage on the town's signature night, it would be him. Yet all of these people have been shunted out of the spotlight in the interests of a broadcast increasingly focused on being "hip" and "of the moment": Brownlow, Wallach, and Coppola were honored at a private ceremony in November 2010. (Godard, rightly, ignored the self-important yet condescending event.)

In 2012, for the third year running, the Honorary Awards will not be included in the Academy Awards broadcast. Presumably, this is so the show's producers can liberate more space for corny and instantly dated jokes, bad musical numbers, and appearances by starlets and celebrities who will be probably be forgotten within the limited lifetime of the ignored, elderly Honorees.

The irony is extreme (even more so this year, when nominees like "The Artist" and "Hugo" openly celebrate film history). With the advent of Netflix, the Criterion Collection, and the internet, the classics have become more accessible than ever - now is the perfect time to introduce home audiences to cinematic icons who contributed to this history. Instead, the Academy has decided to flip off the past - its own history, as well as that of the industry and the art form it ostensibly honors.

TUNING OUT

My own history with the Academy Awards goes way back. I started following the Oscar race in the spring of 1991, when I was 7 years old, too young to have seen most of the films nominated yet fascinated by the process and the hubbub. I devoured books on the Academy, casually memorizing the Best Picture winners of every year. To this day, if someone names a year I can tell them instantly what won - always a popular party trick.

For twenty years I watched every single broadcast, either live or via VHS tape the following morning - even the first year that the Honorary Oscars were first axed from the show. But not this time. If anyone wants to start a petition or spread the word, I'll sign on...but of course I doubt it will make much difference. My personal boycott is less an effort to change anything than an individual statement: enough is enough.

Any institution which ignores or disrespects its own history - especially when that history is far more bountiful than the present - merits only contempt and scorn. Despite its troubled and mixed legacy, the Academy Awards served as an intermittent beacon, reminding millions of viewers that the motion picture medium was an art form as well as industry, an art form one with a rich and powerful history - created by legends, living and gone, illuminated on Awards night. This coming Sunday, all is dark - the beacon will be turned off.

And so will my TV set.

Cross-posted at Wonders in the Dark

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Lost and Found - and Back in Action

May 2, 2012, 10:00 am

≫ Next: What are 100 (of Your) Favorite Movies?

≪ Previous: Dishonorary Awards: Why Not to Watch the Oscars This Year

In which The Dancing Image is removed, restored, and - as of today - reactivated

I thought it was all over.

Last week, I passed my blog on to a co-worker, thinking he would enjoy some of the features. When I came to work Monday, I was told the address didn't work. Thinking he must have typed it in wrong, I jumped on his smart phone to connect him directly. What I found when I reached thedancingimage.blogspot.com made my blood run cold..."This blog has been removed." No explanation of who/what/where/why/when just a simple message apparently sweeping away 4 years of dedication, passion, and organization - what (embarrassing as it may be to admit) was the work I valued most from the harried, often frustrating time known as my mid-twenties.

There was no message from Google or Blogger in my inbox, and attempting to post on Help forums just led me in circles. I began to panic - calling friends of friends of friends with technical expertise, using lunch breaks at work to e-mail other bloggers via friends' smart phones (which, having a resolutely dumb phone myself, I'm still not used to using). By Tuesday, I had grimly begun to assume the worst - the blog was gone.

In some ways I was lucky - I have every single thing I've ever written backed up in Word Documents, and caches and archives seemed to ensure that some sort of static image of how the site looked (a sort of virtual tombstone) would continue to exist. But the increasingly popular address (whose views, primarily via Google image searches, continued to rise even when I didn't update the blog) was now defunct, disconnecting followers and fellow travelers, and even if I started a new blog (which would have to be far simpler in effect and content) it would take months or years to build the audience and exposure back up. This was especially disheartening because later this year I hope to move into low-budget filmmaking, and to unveil my work via this platform.

Well, enough of the handwringing. I resolved to move on, to turn a negative into a positive, by starting fresh with a new website and inviting everyone to my new home. I headed to the local library (where I do all of my internet surfing these days) firmly dedicated to turning over a new leaf. I waited outside as the librarian opened the doors, headed downstairs with rapid step, logged in...only to discover that the city's network was down! I spent the hour before work visiting the sites I could access with the turtle's crawl browser speed and wondering why the gods hate me so.

Well, today, apparently, I'm back in their favor. This morning I woke up committed to finishing yesterday's work. I discovered, in my inbox (where the fantastic support team of Sam Juliano, Tony D'Ambra, and Jaime Grijalba - with forwarding help from Bob Clark - tried to help me through this disaster) that the site was apparently working in some other national domains. Then I typed in my home address again and, with the kind of weary relief that comes only to those who have already grimly accepted the worst, discovered that The Dancing Image was alive again, restored to health miraculously like the wife at the end of Dreyer's Ordet.

A silly comparison, perhaps, and indeed all the drama surrounding this incident does make me feel a bit ridiculous. As other people overheard my troubles, some seemed to find it vaguely amusing - no doubt they pictured an online journal with a few personal posts, easily restored or reactivated. At one point I called the site a "virtual home" which had burnt down - sure, I'd saved my possessions but the grounds were now depressingly bare. Still, a virtual home is not a real home and people endure worse disasters every second of the day (something I should be especially aware of since my job now entails work with the Red Cross!).

Yet I'd be lying if I cavalierly mocked my own panic and frustration. Because the fact is, as I realized while troubleshotting this whole situation, this blog means the world to me. I've abandoned and renewed it multiple times, given it numerous facelifts, organized the shit out of it - mostly, truth be told, for my own amusement (for me, organizing and designing the presentation of a blog is akin to gardening for other people - it's an activity I find both stimulating and relaxing, offering a sense of satisfaction upon completion, to the extent it's ever completed!). I've written pieces that made me immensely proud when I looked them over afterwards, and penned others that made me cringe, though I ever only scrapped one (my penultimate post of 2011, which I turned into a more fitting farewell). I've created 500 posts, gained 70 followers, and generated about 200,000 views (though God knows which ones are spam referrals or hit-and-run picture picks - still, high traffic helps bring quality visitors to the site too so it's all good). In the scheme of things, this is still a very low-profile, under-the-radar blog but as much as I love reaching other people the blog is first and foremost a personal statement; despite (or perhaps because of) its focus on movies rather than my personal life, the site has been a mirror into which I could look and fashion a more appealing reflection.

2012, especially in the past few months, has seen immense changes in my life, perhaps the greatest I've yet experienced. I have put many past attachments behind me and am increasingly summoning up energy to focus entirely on the future - a future in which I can stop procrastinating and distracting myself (services that, sadly, this blog has also proved adept in facilitating) from the dreams that both inspire and intimidate me. At first, this minor catastrophe seemed to be a grim reminder of that process. Now that the Frankenstein's monster has been resuscitated, however, I still intend to take the opportunity to move forward rather than back.

For those who do want to look back, either because they're new to The Dancing Image or because they feel they've missed something or many things over the years, you can check out my last post of 2011, a massive round-up of the work I'm proudest of, with links to various directories through which you can explore my content.

Right now, however, I want to look forward. Here's what I plan to do from now on - at least once a week, I will put up a fresh post on this site. Many will be simple film reviews (when discussing a single film, I will usually shorten my observations on movies to capsule size - I have a tendency to get long-winded, case in point this very post!), others will be more ambitious formal analyses of film style, complete with pictures, videos, and text, and some may be fun or pithy observations. Really I don't want to publicly set goals which I then have to scramble to catch up with, but privately I've already filled several notebook pages with ideas.

Most importantly, over time, I hope to make The Dancing Image a forum for filmmaking - both for myself (premature to speak of, as right now I'm just barely scratching at the shell of the egg to break out) and for dedicated, creative, and scrappy filmmakers with limited resources but big imaginations, many of whom have contacted me over the past few months proposing interviews to expose their work. I sense in them kindred spirits, and I hope that they too will become part of this site's legacy in the long run.

Thanks to all of those who offered support, silently or otherwise. Thanks to those who have read, commented on, lurked, followed, or tweeted The Dancing Image over the years. Please continue to do so. It's been a fun ride - and I'm glad it's not over yet.

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What are 100 (of Your) Favorite Movies?

May 7, 2012, 9:42 am

≫ Next: Ben-Hur

≪ Previous: Lost and Found - and Back in Action

An Open Question for Bloggers, Lurkers, and Stumblers

Call it a meme if you like, though I think the term's gone out of fashion. Anyway, I'm not setting any rules or regulations, and I'm not tagging anyone - just asking a question that I'd love to see answered. The "(of Your)" part of the title is essential; these lists need not be definitive in any way. They should just represent movies you want to highlight at this particular moment to express your taste or amuse yourself and others. If a hundred titles are too many, or too few, pick another number. Feel free to include pictures and brief explanations (that was the most fun part for me) - or not. You can respond in the comments below or on your own blog; you can tag others or follow my lead and just ask everyone. And of course you could snicker at the question and say, huffily (as a fellow in a Joy Division shirt recently sneered at me when I asked his favorite of their albums), "I hate those stupid questions!" But where's the fun in that?

Here's my own list, from last December (already there's a bunch of stuff I would change around): 100 of My Favorite Movies

Enjoy yourselves. I'm really interested to see who picks what.

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Ben-Hur

May 13, 2012, 3:06 pm

≫ Next: The Long Goodbye

≪ Previous: What are 100 (of Your) Favorite Movies?

Around 1991, when I kicked off my video collection in earnest (the few kids' films I owned up to that point didn't really count towards a self-conscious canon), Ben-Hur was one of the first VHS tapes I purchased - or that my father purchased for me anyway; at 7, I didn't have much in the way of a disposable income. I remember seeing the case in a video store somewhere in Boston - around Easter, I think. I was impressed by the grandeur of that iconic poster on the cover, with the title chiseled out of the hard rock of a canyon face, against which a Roman statue leaned while tiny chariots raced around the huge letters. I was spurred on too by the bulk of the video package - remember that at this time, long films got two cassettes, creating a hefty physical size to match the scope of the movie within.

Ben-Hur quickly became one of my favorites - it had so much going for it. First, the story - an epic tale of betrayal, revenge and determination, with Jewish aristocrat Judah Ben-Hur losing his home and his family and vowing revenge on childhood pal Messala, grown drunk on ruthless imperial power. Then the stirring score, the "wandering narrative" adventure, and the appeal of the exotic locale. Growing up Catholic I always had a fondness for films set in the rugged deserts and hardscrabble villages and cities of the Holy Land: a sparse but spiritually pregnant landscape. Meanwhile, on the less lofty level, despite its improbable G rating, the movie had ample action and violence; my macabre friends and I would slo-mo the brutal tramplings in the Circus. And of course I dug Charlton Heston's intensity through it all...as a kid he was probably my favorite actor for a while.

I'm not sure when I noticed that, visually, the film seemed to be...missing something, on the edges. Or that the characters' faces bore a striking relation to Stretch Armstrong. I did notice that when the chariot race began, black bars grew on the top and bottom of the frame. Only much later would I deduce that, rather than cutting off the picture, this was actually enlarging it. I just knew that the black frames were rather distracting. Eventually, of course, I realized that the Ben-Hur I'd watched and loved so many times was maybe about 1/3 of the actual movie, picturewise anyway.

With an aspect ratio of 2.76:1, shot both anamorphically and on 70mm, Ben-Hur is one of the largest movies ever made. So for the video transfer, trying to fit the film into a TV frame, Ben-Hur not only lost its edges (as did most widescreen films) it had to be squeezed, artificially elongating faces and decor. Having this in mind, the VHS tape eventually became unwatchable. Yet the eventual DVD version never felt like a huge improvement. Yes, it was the full picture, finally, but what was gained in information was lost in scale. Suddenly the whole picture was there, but I was stuck with only 1/3 of the TV frame - sort of like watching the movie through a peephole.

Meanwhile, I began to grow weary of the movie itself. It still had sentimental, nostalgic value but in comparison to the fleet films of old Hollywood or the French New Wave it began to seem somewhat stodgy and static. Next to a wildly inventive and at times abstract film like Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur's use of the desert landscape seemed sort of stingy. And the (what Andrew Sarris would call) "strained seriousness" of the storyline and the religious themes didn't resonate with me quite as much anymore. When I encountered the usual attacks on Ben-Hur, I tended to concede the point intellectually but plead for emotional mercy from the critical court.

Last year, one of my blogger buddies (Bob Clark of Wonders in the Dark) wrote about seeing the film on the big screen during the New York Film Festival. His astute recap of the visual experience is worth quoting at length:

"There’s all sorts of reasons to walk into Ben Hur with a kind of modern cynicism that makes one immune to all the dated mannerisms, aesthetically and dramatically, when watching it on television. It has an arch, dramatic stiffness at times that doesn’t translate well to the small-screen, even when broadcast in widescreen format, which gives you all the details of the picture but crunches them down so small you don’t feel as though you’re looking through a letterbox as much as peering at a postage stamp.

Spread out on the big screen, however, all that changes. The picture comes alive and swallows you whole in ways that can’t be approximated on the most expensive of home-viewing set ups. All those fetishistically crafted sets that can appear like diorama miniatures on television breathe more fully when projected larger than life, letting you see the expressive tendencies in the subdued range of colors and set-design throughout, the kind of direction that would lead to Ridley Scott’s world-building spectacles. All those overlong takes take on a more generous dimension sitting in the theater, daunted by the sheer scale and majesty of the film’s recreation of ancient Rome at the height of its colonial powers, and gives added weight to the subject of Imperial rule and the question of how to deal with it from the perspective of the conquered. It’s a question that is put expressly into dramatic form as Charlton Heston’s heroic Jewish prince suffers betrayal at the hands of his boyhood friend, turned Roman occupier, and survives the slavery of the galleys and the do-or-die races of the Circus Maximus to win freedom and justice for his family. These are the stakes and scopes that the epic form were meant for, and this is by far the way these epics were meant to be seen, at a scale that for two or three hours at a time positively dwarfs anything else in your field of experience."

With this in mind, I was intrigued to see the film with fresh eyes, or rather on a fresh scale for my eyes to take in: spread out like a tapestry across the screen of a huge movie theater, where it was meant to be seen, and where the old critical complaint (can't remember who said it) that watching Ben-Hur was like "watching a freight train pass by" might almost seem like a compliment. My opportunity came sooner than expected - literally on the eve of Easter, the grand Egyptian theater (where Ben-Hur actually premiered back in 1959) unveiled a sharp HD print of the film with a restored soundtrack. I headed into Hollywood, found free parking (metered would not do for a 4+ hour movie), and settled in for a memorable cinematic experience.

It certainly was. I relayed my initial impressions in a Google chat with Bob soon after:

"ironically, the big screen didnt so much amplify the visual experience for me (i mean it did a bit, but not as much as i expected - there were only a few moments of spectacle where i felt the full breadth of the screen viscerally) as the dramatic content, reminding me of why i liked it so much as a kid. that sequence where he crawls through the low-ceilinged leper colony comes to mind. thats actually a great use of the horizontal span - using the wider frame to ironically make the image more claustrophobic. and i love all the stuff on the galley. for all the sentimentality surrounding its reception and dismissal its a pretty hard-hitting, stoic film much of the time.

yeah, they get off in the end, but its kind of like its a wonderful life - the happy ending doesnt really mitigate the sobering repressed angst simmering for the rest of the running length - at the very least it feels justified by it & the digital projection was pretty damn impressive."

A month out, my takeaway from the experience is that, in its solid, somewhat conventional, and occasionally tedious way, Ben-Hur offers a powerful narrative and visual experience - with the visual subtly reinforcing the narrative. Despite the scale, this isn't really a spectacle in the sense that the visuals lead. Yet the most memorable moments definitely have a pictorial power: the gruelling galley routine as Judah and his fellow slaves row their masters through endless seas, cramped and confined in a wooden prison as the waves beat around them (with Jack Hawkins' dialogue providing a memorable parallel to the tough despair we see before us); that leper colony I mentioned in which the vast panoramic frame manages to feel claustrophobic rather than limiting, creating a true sense of a netherworld to which our hero has descended; and of course, the chariot race in which the theme of the film - physical suffering as a form of justice (more masochistic than sadistic) finds its logical expression.

Above all, I realized how - despite its stark visual differences from a deep-focused, compositionally rich film like The Best Years of Our Lives - Ben-Hur still nestles snugly into director William Wyler's oeuvre. Most don't really think of Wyler as a full-fledged auteur, preferring to see him as a very capable craftsman. Yet there is a thematic consistency to much of his work. When I reflect on the subjects he ended up executing (the wild passions of Wuthering Heights, the intricate blackmail and murder of The Letter, the poignant disappointments and quiet joys of The Best Years of Our Lives, and the slow-boiling, muted ferocity of Ben-Hur are the four films that instantly come to mind) I realize that many of his best films dealt with a kind of purification through pain - physical sometimes, but always emotional. The films aren't always downbeat (even the tragic ones feature a kind of cathartic deliverance) but they all have a sense of weariness and determination which feels quite real.

It's not surprising then that the film ends not with Christ's rebirth but with his death. It's a redemption (Judah's) colored by stoic suffering (Christ's, echoing our hero's earlier in the film). Philosophically, the film feels much closer to Roman stoicism than Christian optimism - whatever its explicit narrative development. With this in mind, and with the visual scope finally living up to the intense emotional edies I'd always sensed beneath the experience, Ben-Hur the film was reborn for me on this memorable Easter eve. Like its protagonist (that would be Judah, not Jesus), it returned from the wilderness more powerful than before - and I gladly welcomed it back into my private, personal collection.

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The Long Goodbye

May 26, 2012, 10:25 am

≫ Next: This is Not a Film & Venom and Eternity

≪ Previous: Ben-Hur

This review contains spoilers about the book and the film.

One of the most unique neo-noirs of the seventies, The Long Goodbye displays both the advantages and pitfalls of free-association adaptation. Both critics and defenders of the film tend to miss the point. Goodbye boosters point to Altman's rich invention and thought-provoking subversion of genre tropes, but tend to take for granted the conventionality of the source - Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Marlowe had become in '73 and remains today a cultural icon as the prototypical private eye thanks to Chandler's series of detective stories and novels spanning the thirties and forties and (especially pertinent here) the films based on this material. Meanwhile, the film's critics notice what Gould's and Altman's Marlowe is missing but don't seem to appreciate what is added to, or even improved upon, from the book. The latter group have become more obsolete these days, as the distance from Chandler's era increases and the movie becomes more and more a part of the cinematic firmament it once seemed to subvert - a fixture rather than an outlier. In the mean time, I sense, less and less people commenting on the film have actually read the book it's based on, or realize how much the film's sense of subversion, disappointment, and distance shares with the novel itself - and what the film misses in some of its broader departures.

In a sense, this is not very surprising. When Leigh Brackett adapted The Long Goodbye, Chandler's penultimate (and to many eyes, best) Marlowe novel, it had been twenty years since the book was written and few eras have been as tumultuous as that which passed between 1953 and 1973. Screenwriter Leigh Brackett (who had worked on the most famous Chandler adaptation, The Big Sleep, in the mid-forties) felt a need to update the book, claiming that parts of it were implausible and "unsatisfactory." She wanted to update it to the seventies, recognizing that codes of masculinity and social behavior had been transformed; she sensed that it would seem silly or stilted if the postwar milieu was preserved in amber (as indeed it does in the contemporaneous period adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely). Brackett eliminated the femme fatale (Eileen Wade remains disingenuous but is no longer deadly), updated the setting, and most importantly made Terry Lennox, Marlowe's friend and the engine of the plot, into a narcissistic villain whom Marlowe murders himself in the dramatically-altered conclusion. Altman want even further with Brackett's revisions, using improvisatory methods, free association additions, and cinematographic invention (heavy use of zoom lenses, camera movement, and film-flashing) to dilute the remaining influence of the old noirs until Marlowe - driving an old forties car, and wearing a suit - came to seem a fish-out-of-water, a relic of Old Hollywood adrift in the New; although his hipster demeanor and lack of emotional control mark even him as a post-sixties figure.

What results is a fascinating but at times disappointing revision of Chandler's The Long Goodbye. The film is best seen as a collection of bold and vigorous gestures and details, moments that may seem out of place or off-kilter - in that sense, of a piece with Altman's thrillingly unsettling oeuvre. As a collection of such fragments, The Long Goodbye is a very rich picture. But as a totality, it loses much of the novel's psychological complexity, emotional resonance, and structural integrity - unsurprising as Brackett seems to have missed much of the novel's appeal, and Altman himself claims to have read the open and close of the book but little in between. In Chandler's version, the connection between Marlowe and his friend Terry Lennox is established right away and allowed to develop before Lennox comes to Marlowe and asks him to assist in a flight across the border to Mexico. We learn not only how friendship developed between the two very different men (Lennox is a morose alcoholic, Marlowe a private eye with impeccable self-control), but begin to suspect why - despite Lennox's weakness and Marlowe's strength, both men are sensitive, sad, and out of place in the surrounding world. Lennox sees in Marlowe a better version of himself, while Marlowe sees in Lennox a trap into which he could easily fall. Thus we understand why Marlowe, without asking any questions, assists Lennox in an escape from the police after Lennox's rich, promiscuous wife has been killed (perhaps by himself).

In the movie, Lennox is a glib playboy. Unlike the figure in the book, a war hero with a scarred face, this Lennox seems to be an untroubled figure, not haunted by any demons or memories. We don't really understand why Marlowe is friends with him - he just is - and Marlowe's later loyalty, it is indicated within the film and without (through comments by Brackett, Altman, and others), is a foolish gesture of chivalry, out of place in the modern era. When Lennox turns out to be a scumbag, having actually murdered his wife and put Marlowe on the spot, we aren't surprised and Marlowe's defense of his friend seems old-fashioned and silly as Lennox himself points out, and as Marlowe eventually admits (by shooting Lennox for his betrayal). It's been indicated that this is a subversion of Chandler's own code, an acknowledgement that his vision of the detective as latter-day knight was overly romantic and unrealistic, but in fact this is a gross simplification of the Marlowe ethos. Marlowe is a romantic, but he isn't a fool - and the book, with its flavor of disappointment, its already-existing indication that Marlowe is a man out of place and time (and moreover, that he knows it), hardly needs to be subverted for the benefit of "modern" sensibilities (as if those didn't already exist in 1953).

Chandler closes the novel with Lennox returning to L.A. and visiting Marlowe in disguise. Marlowe recognizes him and returns a $5000 bill which Lennox sent and Marlowe kept, unused, as a souvenir. He realizes that Lennox, while not actually a murderer or untroubled conscience (as in the movie), is cowardly and self-serving and that even Marlowe's seemingly realistic sense of loyalty and friendship were chimerical concepts. The conclusion, in which Marlowe does not shoot Lennox but rather gives him the cold shoulder, is far more powerful than the Mexican shoot-'em-up at the end of the movie, and is far more charged with disappointment and a sense of loss, because more is at stake. Altman's conclusion was celebrated and defended as a more realistic, subversive, and moral conclusion than Chandler's, but I'd argue it's exactly the reverse. Indeed, it's a far more "Hollywood" ending than Chandler's and it's rather remarkable that it could be accepted as anything else (some writers have tried to pass it off as an ironic gesture, reflecting but not endorsing the era's obsession with vigilante gesture, but Altman's own statements on the subject seem to contradict this reading).

Brackett and Altman are far more successful with two other characters - one major and one minor - for opposite reasons. Roger Wade, the alcoholic novelist who is murdered in a fake suicide in the book, and actually commits suicide (by walking into the sea) in the movie, remains a blustering, melancholy triumph of characterization on page and screen. It's been suggested that Marlowe, Lennox, and Wade represent a tripartite self-portrait on Chandler's part, manifestations of the disciplined, pathetic, and grandiose aspects of his personality respectively. While missing the Chandleresque overtones in Lennox and handling Marlowe with mixed results, Altman immediately recognized Wade's similarities to the author. By casting Sterling Hayden, old-school actor, repentent informer, and recovering alcoholic (recovering apparently with copious helpings of hash), Altman enhances the sense of Wade as a figure from the past, a movingly tragic figure in a world that has forgotten the meaning of tragedy. The only major misstep in the Wade sequences involves not Wade, but Marlowe, whose drunken, teary tirade after Wade's death is completely out of character, even for the less disciplined seventies version of the sleuth onscreen. On the other hand, there is a brilliant transformation of Dr. Verringer (Wade's quack doctor) into a spiteful little troll who humiliates Wade at a party by asking the much larger man for money and then slapping across the face.

This is where Altman is best, finding cinematic gestures to get across literary devices - instead of dialogue, we get action demonstrating Wade's loss of dignity, a visual moment that is both surprising and infinitely right. It is echoed by what may be the film's most famous moment, also an addition with no correlation in the book (or Brackett's screenplay): when gangster Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle across his demure girlfriend's face, in order to show Marlowe what will happen if he doesn't turn over Lennox's money - "Her, I love. You I don't even like." The character of Augustine, barely adapted from Chandler's Marty Melendez (probably the weakest, most cliched character in the book), is the film's best invention and largely the work of director/actor Mark Rydell, who didn't like Brackett's characterization in the screenplay, and whose suggestions Altman enthusiastically embraced. He is both funny and nasty, at once a larger-than-life cartoon of a swingin' seventies mobster and a reminder of the dark reality hovering around the playful genre games of the movie (this is the aspect Altman highlighted most). Augustine is one of the areas where the film actually improves upon the book.

The Long Goodbye is in many ways an excellent picture - and it's unarguably inventive, from its innovative photography, to its loose performances, to its clever use of a single song (in multiple forms on the soundtrack), and most importantly for its willingness to embrace wildly irreverent and bracing asides (Marlowe's blackface in the interrogation room, Augustine's Coke bottle violence and bizarre clothes-stripping "redemption," the humping dogs caught in a Mexican montage, that brilliant harmonica flourish which helps redeem the ending). Its use of stormy seas at Malibu vs. the lifeless enclave of the books' "Idle Valley" seems more resonant to me (though as a beach bum, perhaps I'm biased). It succeeds as a collection of knickknacks and odd-ends and since this is, to a large extent, how cinema thrives - the termitic charms of the medium, to borrow critic Manny Farber's formulation - this is a very good thing. But it still seems a pity that Altman and Brackett seem so uninterested in the very heart of Chandler's book, the thing that makes it more penetrating and timeless - despite its ostensibly "old-fashioned" setting and the familiarity that has set in around its tropes and icons (although it's worth remembering that the book is actually intended as a subversion and departure from the earlier detective fiction in and of itself).

The book is about the author, reader, and characters, engaging in the long goodbyes of life. The film - except for the scenes with Sterling Hayden as Wade - is more about a world in which the long goodbye has already been said, and now we can't even remember why.

In researching this piece, I had help from the following books: A Cinema of Loneliness, by Robert Kolker; Creatures of Darkness, by Gene Phillips; Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff; Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff, by Patrick McGilligan; The Raymond Chandler Papers, edited by Tom Hiney & Frank MacShane; and Raymond Chandler, by William Marling.

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This is Not a Film & Venom and Eternity

June 6, 2012, 10:58 am

≫ Next: Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

≪ Previous: The Long Goodbye

A few months ago, I saw This is Not a Film for the first time. I had just arrived in Los Angeles and it seemed somehow appropriate to view Jafar Panahi's documentary about his own house arrest (and his desire to make a film despite the Iranian regime's ban on that activity for him, following his support of a protest movement) - on the outskirts of Hollywood. After all, This is Not a Film (smuggled into the 2011 Cannes Film Festival in a cake) represents a challenge and a question, or several questions, to conventional assumptions about cinema. Is the film(?)'s title true? Is it a film - or to raise the stakes even higher, a movie? What is a movie? Is it simply pointing a camera - film, video, whatever - and shooting something?

That question seems a perfect set-up for an authoritative "no" followed by a discourse on how the simple act of photography-in-motion is not sufficient, and filmmakers need one or more of the following to create a real movie: actors, a story, multiple shots, editing, creative use of the frame, etc etc. Even Jafar Panahi himself seems to hold to this theory at times, bemoaning that his discussion of what he would shoot, if he could, can't hold a candle to the actual result itself. "If the script was the movie," he sighs, "then I wouldn't need to shoot the movie." But, in fact, my answer to the question is "yes" - whether the end result is a sloppy home movie, an experimental art film, a big-budget blockbuster, or test footage for technical purposes the end result is, in an essential sense, a movie.

Is it enough of a movie? Depends. Under certain circumstances, a home movie can be just as valuable as an intensely worked-over fiction film or a painstakingly assembled documentary. A single shot can be as moving as an artful montage and unstudied observation of a real incident or person can be as revealing as a carefully constructed performance. Obviously craft plays into this, but so does accident (or more positively, circumstance) - at the right time and place, anyone holding a camera can capture something magical. The reason This is Not a Film is a great work rather than just a powerful protest or an interesting fly-on-the-wall observational piece is that Panahi slyly plays with our expectations and sense of what we're watching.

Panahi's explanations of his aborted film project are at once a practical tool and an aesthetic experience, slyly fusing film's documentary and imaginative aspects (its two essential motors since the era of the Lumieres and Melies). At times we wonder if This is Not a Film even is a documentary or if certain events are staged/planned, like when Panahi starts shooting on his iPhone and then assumes his cameraman's rig, explicitly violating the ruling imposed against him, or when the garbage collector shows up in the elevator and escorts Panahi down to the fires on the street below, like Dante descending into the ninth circle of hell - although in this case the descent has a feeling of liberation as well as danger about it. No surprise; liberation usually is dangerous. In this sense, Panahi's camera is both a flashlight and a dagger.

Sixty years earlier, another filmmaker used the camera as a dagger, but mostly aimed it at itself - and himself. In 1951, Venom and Eternity was screened by Isidor Isou, friend of Jean Cocteau and youthful Lettrist (deconstructing language by assembling letters seemingly randomly in texts, creating fresh aesthetic experiences that skirted familiarity). The experimental classic is an all-out assault on conventional notions of cinema and an explicit predecessor to the film-scratching of Stan Brakhage, the swooning subjectivity/narcissism of the New Wave, and the aggressive deconstruction of conventional film representation seen in the late 60s and early 70s avant-garde. Isou begins by restlessly declaring that the cinema needs to re-invent itself, that it is in a post-classical period and needs to self-consciously reassemble its elements the way Picasso did with painting.

Isou's greatest attack is on the image itself: he scorns the visual nature of cinema, questions its representative capablities, and to demonstrate this contempt he repeats fairly mundane shots of the street and creates an perpetual narration on the soundtrack as if to say, So movies are supposed to visuals first, talk second? Take this! The gesture has a perverse tinge to it, and it seems at times as if he's moving the cinema back rather than forward (though his monologue about a thwarted, perverse relationship is both metaphorically significant and narratively fascinating - something he realizes and eventually rejects himself, since he wants to avoid narrative). Unlike his Lettrist poems, which take that particular art form - literature - to its formal essence, here he seems to be spitting on the essence of cinema which could potentially be a dead end. Yet he uses this introduction as a launching point into a fantastic middle section, in which he reads lettrist poems over images of physically-scratched celluloid - an expansion of the form rather than a self-imposed limitation.

In rejecting so stridently the history and quiet power of the cinema, at times Isou seems to be a bit of a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum, especially in contrast to Panahi's struggle against existing censorship and repression - does the angry Frenchman know what he has? How can he reject so much of it so casually? This reflects the mixed legacy of a certain branch of modern twentieth-century art, a destructive impulse which was often thrilling and adventurous, but could lead ultimately to aesthetic dead ends, easily co-opted by the very bourgeois society which was supposedly the target and in the process shutting off a vital venue of liberation and contemplation that had been incorrectly tied to the very system it challenged. Which is another way of saying that self-consciousness can be a trap as well as an escape hatch.

There were great ironies in the ways I watched these two films - Venom and Eternity the day before I screened This is Not a Film, the older movie (shot on actual film) on a laptop, intermittently flickering through You Tube, the newer (shot on video, parts even on an iPhone) in an old-fashioned movie theater named after one of the studio system's founders, Carl Laemmle. This is fitting in a way. Isou dreamed off breaking out of what to him seemed a straitjacket of cinematic limitations. Today we have broken out of that straitjacket but the result can seem chaotic and trivial in comparison to what those former limitations imposed. The answer is not a retreat but rather a rerouting, and I think Panahi accomplishes this marvelously within limitations that were anything but self-imposed. Having been robbed of the cinema, he treats it not resentfully as a burden but as a weapon. The result is a film, and a great one - it gives you hope for the future; if the cinema can survive Panahi's circumstances, can't it survive anything?

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Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

June 16, 2012, 1:09 pm

≫ Next: Spade & Marlowe, Private Eyes (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, on page and screen)

≪ Previous: This is Not a Film & Venom and Eternity

Short thoughts on: The deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni • The Wild One • The Virgin Spring • The Departed and Infernal Affairs • Pan's Labyrinth and The Spirit of the Beehive • John Cassevetes and Noah Baumbach • The Stranger • Benito Mussolini's weenie

A year and a half ago, I transferred ten of my old comments from the Internet Movie Database to The Dancing Image, in a post called "Fragments of Cinephilia". This here is the follow-up: ten further memoirs of my pre-blogging days, in this case recycled from the summer of 2007 and including some great quotations from others. The topics range from heady to trivial: we start on a silent Olympus and end with a castrated dictator. Feel free to leave your own musings below - one of the pleasures of my old hunting ground (the IMDb) was the give-and-take, and I'd love to see it continue here. Enjoy.

On the death of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, within 24 hours of one another:

"Olympus almost empty"

For Godard, it must be lonely at the top. Two giants of filmmaking (THE two giants, in terms of influence and longevity) no longer walk among us...for some reason I'm reminded of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams dying the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (July 4 for those non-Yanks). I'm not sure what significance July 30 has for cinema history (other than the one it just acquired) but how strange that it happened like this...

As far as "greatest" who can really say? But if there's a cinematic Olympus on Earth, I'd argue that Godard ... may be its only remaining inhabitant. Not to knock great directors of their generation, like Resnais, Rohmer, and Rivette, or younger filmmakers either, but those two are the only ones whose influence, reputations, and bodies of work compare to Bergman's.

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Collecting some of the most cogent observations I encountered following the Bergman/Antonioni deaths:

The more astute eulogies for these two deceased legends have been hinting at the troubling distance between their films and the current pop culture ethos, which I'd describe as "apathetic conformism disguised as subversive irony".

"...the time has come to seek once more the earnestness we're making fun of. When everything had to be tone-in-tone, when a tight-fitting suit and teased hair were the ne plus ultra of the feminine aesthetic, it was good to throw a little dirt on the cream-coloured costumes. But nowadays when trash rules, we feel a longing for the clear, full-screen beauty of the young Monica Vitti." [http://www.signandsight.com/features/1469.html]

"'I mean, the silence, God's silence... OK, OK... I mean, I loved it at Radcliffe, but alright, you outgrow it!' Surely Allen means us to reject the self-loathing, brittle Wilke, who churns out novelizations of popular movies instead of trying to create serious art. But her comments nail the Bergman/Antonioni pretensions and the mindset that would most appreciate them. She also sees Bergman's 'fashionable pessimism' as 'adolescent.' This hits even closer to the bone. Wilke has a point. Several points, actually. She is also evil. Her pop mindset rules today, and we have to do everything we can to topple it. Paying attention to the virtues of Bergman and Antonioni is definitely a step in the right direction." [http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/08/eclipse-losing-bergman-and-antonioni.html]

And last but not least, A.O. Scott, hitting the nail on the head, particularly with the last line: "There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value - that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure - enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness." [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/01/movies/05scot.html?_r=1&ref=movies&oref=slogin]

(Anyone looking for links to these & other articles should check here, where I discovered them myself: http://daily.greencine.com/archives/004148.html)

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On why The Wild One (1954) is underrated:

I finally saw The Wild One last night after years of being a film buff and Brando fan. I was expecting a campy, dated film but I was actually very impressed. Yes, the behavior of the bikers is often too silly to be threatening. Yes, Brando and many of the other bikers are too old for their parts. Yes, the language sometimes makes one cringe. But I found the story and the images fascinating (particularly the scene where Brando and Murphy race through those white trees in the night) and felt that, despite its flaws, the film tapped into something almost primal. It has an allegorical quality, almost as if sometime stepped into a time machine circa 1969 and went back to the early 50's to make this film as a prediction of what was to come.

Indeed, the movie represents the radical view of what happened in the late 60's quite well. The counterculture rides into the heart of straight, middle America, exciting the otherwise obedient youth, bemusing the good citizens (who try to humor them) at first, and eventually arousing the ire and wrath of the forces of reaction, while the liberals sit by and wring their hands ineffectively.

If Douglas Sirk's sentimental melodramas and numerous cheesy sci-fi/horror B flicks can earn rereadings focusing on the effectiveness of their pulp and the evocative nature of their images and themes, why can't this film? I think, in the long run, its prestige and iconic nature have hurt its reputation rather than helped it. I disagree with the poster who said that without Brando's performance it would be dismissed. Had it been a second-run drive-in feature which gathered a cult status, it might be more revered today. Instead, its "official" status builds up expectations and causes people to notice the missteps rather than the achievements.

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On the formal triumph of Bergman's The Virgin Spring

I've always been partial to The Seventh Seal, but upon watching The Virgin Spring for the second time (after watching all of his early work I could get my hands on in order) it struck me that this is in fact his most "cinematic" film, the one that is most assured, that tells its story primarily through visuals and has an unerring sense of timing, pacing, and intensity. I think it's also his first real collaboration with DP Sven Nykvist (save some interiors in Sawdust & Tinsel) and while the cinematography in the Gunnar Fischer films is often fantastic, there's a lumnosity and depth to the work here which lends it a transcendent quality new to Bergman's work.

In some ways, Seventh Seal remains my favorite pre-Trilogy Bergman (I'm a sucker for overambitious pictures that bite off more than they can chew) but unlike that film and Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring's simpler, almost elemental, story allows it more room to breathe, ruminate, and gives it a power undiluted by multiple storylines and intellectual games. So for all these reasons, I'm inclined to say it's Bergman's finest work up to 1960.

(And yes, I know Bergman himself didn't care for it and that his heart probably wasn't in the ending and the general ethos of the film. He didn't even write it, a rarity for him at this point. But just as the great Hollywood auteurs poured the exquisite craftsmanship into projects that on the surface did not seem personal, the film hardly exists outside of Bergman's filmmaking, which is exquisite).

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On how The Departed compares to to its Hong Kong inspiration, Infernal Affairs (spoilers)

I enjoyed The Departed but I certainly don't consider it one of Scorsese's masterpieces. Because I took it as sophisticated and well-made entertainment rather than as serious drama, I could accept the ending. When I finally saw Infernal Affairs (of which Departed, by the way, is NOT a shot-by-shot remake...some sequences are close to what's in the original film, but much of it is very, very different) I realized that in that film, we're meant to take the ending seriously, perhaps too seriously, given the sentimental music. But there's a kind of brute pop poetry to it. The Departed quite flippantly dispatches with the characters we're supposed to be attached to, and luckily we're really not, or at least I wasn't, but I'm not sure if that's good or bad. Certainly not Best Picture-material (though, hell, it was probably their best Best Picture in close to a decade).

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On Bus 174, a documentary about a 2000 bus hijacking in Rio de Janeiro

This must be a different film for people from Brazil (or people who were already familiar with the hijacking story) and people from other countries (I don't remember this being an international news story at the time, and I certainly didn't know the details till I watched the film).

For Brazilians, as you say, the film offers the flip-side of a coin they're already very familiar with. They'd seen the hijacker as pure evil for years and now this film shows the complexity of the situation.

For people like me, this was our first exposure to Sandro and the hijacking, so it may have seemed that the hostages didn't get enough of a voice, and (though this hasn't been mentioned on this thread) that the film was maybe too voyeuristic, slowing down the action, repeating the deaths over and over, relying on the vicarious thrill and fear that the live footage provides (and this movie had more an visceral emotional impact that almost any other documentary I've seen, at least since childhood). Of course, if you're Brazilian this footage must already be extremely familiar, and thus the film appears not as voyeuristic but as unpacking and re-examining footage that has already been digested voyeuristically.

So it seems the film will make a different impression based on where the viewer is coming from (obviously true of any film but I would say more so for one like this).

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On history and fantasy in Pan's Labyrinth and Spirit of the Beehive

Another (semi)similar film is Spirit of the Beehive. I'm surprised no one here mentioned it, given that I'd heard of it before Cria cuervos. It also stars Ana Torrent, and both its themes and timeline are very similar to Pan's Labyrinth.

Actually, I was a somewhat disappointed with Pan...I saw a sneak preview before it hit wide release and became such a cause celebre (although it was already unanimously acclaimed by critics). I thought the fantasy aspect was great (the creature with the eyeballs in his hands was especially memorable) but the depiction of Fascism and the aftermath of the civil war struck me as disappointingly shallow, and the style too slick with all its Star Wars-esque wipes & Lord of the Rings camera movements.

I would recommend both Cria cuervos & Spirit of the Beehive if you are looking for more subtle and penetrating films about this fascinating period in history (and its intersection with a child's fantasy life).

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On the John Cassavetes influence in Noah Baumbach's work:

I have to agree with the other poster who said Cassavetes' work is more raw than Baumbach's. I would hardly call Shadows, A Woman Under the Influence, or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie "cerebral indie drama about middle-class wankers sitting around analyzing themselves." But I haven't seen Faces or a number of his other films, so maybe I'm missing something. Nonetheless, the movies I've seen are more emotional than cerebral, independent in the best sense which is definitely distinct from "indie" as I know it, about working-class rather than middle-class people, and with characters who are defined by behavior far more than any self-analysis.

I think Margot at the Wedding channeled Cassavetes more than Squid & the Whale or Kicking & Screaming, especially stylistically. That said, I didn't like it.

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On my disappointment in Orson Welles' The Stranger and surprise at the fact that it was shot on a studio set.

Funny, I thought it was shot on location (the realistic quality of the small town was one of the things I liked most about it). I think it was the quality of the light mostly. At any rate, I didn't like the film very much. It had its moments - particularly early and late in the film but the plot was contrived, the pacing off, and Welles' directorial flair only shot up in spurts. Too bad because it had quite a few things going for it: Welles as director, of course, but also the aforementioned flavor of the small town (I have to give Welles credit for achieving that atmosphere on a Hollywood backlot), and the confluence of world events and provincialism, but somehow the Nazi in Americana theme felt underutilized for much of the film. Mostly, I just don't think the screenplay was very effective.

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On the roots of the "Whistle While You Work" parody with the verse, "...Hitler is a jerk/Mussolini bit his weenie now it doesn't work/he took it to repair/they filled it up with air/Mussolini popped his weenie now it isn't there". Posted on the "Benito Mussolini" message board, where it got no responses.

I was wondering if anyone knows the genesis of this song...I remember kids singing it when I was in elementary school, which was in the early 90's. Has this song really been a schoolyard tradition for 60+ years?

For the record, I'm still wondering...

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Spade & Marlowe, Private Eyes (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, on page and screen)

June 25, 2012, 2:02 pm

≫ Next: The muddled message of The Dark Knight Rises

≪ Previous: Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

Who is Sam Spade? Who is Philip Marlowe?

Well, for many film buffs, Bogie will always be Bogie. Granted, there's plenty of wiggle room within the Humphrey Bogart persona: the paranoia of Fred C. Dobbs, Dixon Steele, or Captain Queeg; the ruthlessness of those many gangster roles; the lovable grunginess of his turn in The African Queen. But when he dons his detective's fedora and lights his cigarette, there's an iconic continuity to the look, the mannerisms, the speech. One could justifiably assume that Bogart's iconic screen presence eclipses any individual character tics, whether he's supposed to be playing San Francisco sleuth Sam Spade (in John Huston's 1941 The Maltese Falcon) or L.A. dick Philip Marlowe (in Howard Hawks' 1946 The Big Sleep). Yet at root, Spade and Marlowe are very different people - one might even say fundamentally so, despite the superficial similarities and notable overlap. Within the hardboiled detective persona, they represent different motivations and actions - at least as originally conceived.

Page: The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett & The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler

Samuel Spade, private eye in partnership with Miles Archer (until this detested co-worker is shot dead), debuted first - starring in Dashiell Hammett's 1929 The Maltese Falcon. This was to be Spade's only appearance in a novel (later Hammett would pen him into several short stories) but the one-off made a notable impression, upending crime genre conventions left and right. Raymond Chandler himself later pinpointed Hammett's importance, noting in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" that Hammett at once elevated pulp magazine material to the realm of respected literature while also gleefully sinking the mystery genre (previously the province of upscale British drawing-rooms) into the muck of America's urban modernity. Or as the admiring pupil himself put it, "Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley."

Chandler was a lifelong chess enthusiast (a pastime he passed on to his literary creation), and he had an interesting countermove to Hammett's bold opening. Chandler invented Philip Marlowe ten years after Spade changed the game; Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep, followed a half-decade devoted to mastering the pulp genre. This didn't necessarily come easy; unlike Hammett, who had been a Pinkerton detective himself, Chandler had zero acquaintance with the criminal underworld - his childhood had been spent as a privileged British schoolboy, his youth as an aspiring poet and newspaper columnist, and his early middle age as an oil executive in the Southwest. Fired due to excessive drinking, caring for a wife two decades his senior, Chandler decided to finally devote himself to writing - on trips up and down the California coast he began to casually read and then study the dime-store magazines from which he would take his inspiration.

The end result was Philip Marlowe who, like Spade, first appeared - fully formed - in a classic detective novel. But unlike the hero of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep's Marlowe played for keeps - sticking around for six more novels and establishing a legendary reputation eclipsing even Spade's. In certain respects, Marlowe's world is even grittier than Spade's. The Maltese Falcon is stuffed with rich dialogue - characters describing or hinting at their devious deeds. The Big Sleep, foregrounding action over allusion, immerses us in firsthand experience; there's less distance to its violence. Marlowe himself witnesses or even perpetrates several killings (Spade, for all his tough talk, never does much more than beat up a few punks).

Furthermore, the Falcon villains are worldly adventurers, not common criminals - their methods might be down and dirty but their speech and carriage illuminate their erudition, wealth, and even decadence. Sleep, on the other hand, casts its criminals as genuine lowlifes. Even the wealthiest baddie is a common racketeer. And yet despite its darker, grungier texture, the atmosphere in Sleep is also more romantic, more sensitive than Falcon's wry, unflinching cynicism. Even aside from other factors, chronology explains some of this: Spade's invention occurred at the fast-paced, hard-edged apex of the Roaring Twenties, while Marlowe was born after a decade of Depression, on the cusp of a catastrophic war. Marlowe isn't allowed the same defenses and barriers as Spade - his Maginot Line has lone ago been pierced; only a small island of a man, under duress yet defiant, remains to carry on the fight.

This underdog quality, less pronounced in the cooler, less subjectively-presented Spade, gives Marlowe a distinctly romantic, tragic, even quixotic quality. He's immersed in the seamy underworld, but not entrapped by it - up to his neck in dirt, eyes focused skyward. Chandler introduces this chivalric aspect of Marlowe, subtly, in the first chapter of Sleep, as the detective wryly observes a (probably pre-Raphaelite) stained-glass panel of a knight untying a fair maiden: "I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't really seem to be trying." Ironically contrasting the elevated, unreal sense of nobility captured in this picture with the actual muck and hard work required of those who, like Marlowe, must hold to their responsibilities in the real world, the commentary nonetheless reveals a latent sympathy between the modern detective and the storybook hero. After all, would Spade even think to compare his job to that of a knight? In rolling his eyes at old-fashioned romanticism, Marlowe - and Chandler- doth protest too much.

Chandler himself best defined Marlowe's unique qualities with his famous epigram - "down these mean streets must walk a man who is not himself mean." Spade, on the other hand, is kind of mean. Marlowe can be cruel and snide yet he's more sensitive, self-conscious, and sentimental than Spade appears to be (these qualities reach their logical outcome in the disappointment of 1952's The Long Goodbye, where they prove to be the dick's Achilles' heel). Spade takes less physical and psychological abuse than Marlowe: his most notable psychic wound occurs when turning in Brigid O'Shaunessy; only then do we witness the suffering which earns Spade the right to be so hardboiled. Usually, however, he's more guarded.

Which points to perhaps the most singular difference between Marlowe and Spade (at least in print): one narrates his own story, the other does not. In fact we're not even certain until the end of Falcon what Spade's moral scruples are - until he cleverly turns the tables on his supposed collaborators, we wonder if he's actually as corrupt as they are. He holds his cards close and remains, for readers as well as the characters in the book, an aloof and intimidating figure. Hammett (drawing on his Pinkerton experience) would later describe this (anti?)hero as the man every real-life detective hoped to be and occasionally kidded himself he was. Marlowe is also idealized, but we sense the self-portrait is more honest on Chandler's part (not warts-and-all - Marlowe never breaks his personal code - but certainly troubled and weary).

Screen: The Big Sleep (1946)

So, how do these subtle distinctions play out on screen? Unlike the first Marlowe masterpiece (1944's Murder My Sweet, starring Dick Powell and based on Marlowe #2, Farewell My Lovely), The Big Sleep does not feature a first-person voiceover. This lack already draws it closer to the earlier Hammet adaptation, 1941's The Maltese Falcon, in terms of how we experience its protagonist. Furthermore, both films star Humphrey Bogart; do casting and performance further blur the lines? Bogie has been accused of playing Marlowe exactly the same way as Spade - both are tough, skeptical, sardonic, and violent - but the charge is not entirely fair.

Bogart's Marlowe is noticeably more laid-back than his Spade; the actor even invented an ear-tugging gesture, evidence of all-too-human confusion and bemusement that would have been out of place on the rougher, more cagey Falcon P.I. Marlowe seems to be having more casual fun in his role than Spade, suitable for the protagonist of a Howard Hawks film. Yet if this quality highlights a difference in tone between the Sleep from Falcon films, it also highlights a big difference in characterization between Chandler's book and Hawks' movie. Chandler's hero has a sense of humor, but his wounds are more noticeable and the book doesn't end on a note of sexual and romantic triumph but rather with Marlowe drinking alone, longing for the one female in the book (a gangster's moll with a silver wig, almost entirely cut out of the movie) who unambiguously did right by him.

Jaggedly ending the book on a note of melancholy, in a standalone paragraph following what could easily have been a satisfactory closing line ("And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep"), this remarkable, risky coda deserves to be reprinted in full:

"On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again."

The bittersweet tragic romance of this sentiment can receive no quarter in the Hawks universe, and so the cinematic Sleep - despite its reputation as a seminal noir - is very un-noir in theme and tone (and even, compared to the '44 Marlowe picture, in the density and darkness of its visual scheme). Truth told, it's all for the better that Hawks sticks to his own guns because an earlier version of the finished film (completed in '45 before further revisions) highlights Hawks' weaknesses when he strays from his comfort zone. The '45 edition is more faithful to the book, but less satisfying as a complete picture - an attempt to follow the book's spirit when the filmmakers' hearts weren't really in it. The '46 release is lighter, funnier, less logical, and less ambiguous - and a classic.

Sleep's screenplay was written by William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett. Brackett's later treatment of The Long Goodbye offers further evidence that she was never very interested in translating Chandler's sensibility, intact, to the screen: interestingly, in both films Marlowe kills a major character who survived in the respective book (Brackett found such avenging violence more satisfying than the more ambivalent denouements of the novels). Whatever the writers' input, and despite the fact that executives advised revisions (ironically heightening the film's auteur qualities with managerial meddling) it is Hawks' directorial voice which emerges most clearly from the movie's chaotic creation. Unlike, say, John Ford, Hawks doesn't have much room for loners. His films tend to be about camaraderie and/or competition: emphatically social.

No wonder it's the later version of the film, with its more heavily emphasized Bogart-Bacall romance, which feels more assured and entertaining. Sleep was initially trapped between fidelity to the book's skepticism (in which Marlowe can never really trust any of the women - or men, for that matter - around him) and a cleaner, more Hawksian narrative trajectory, an emerging partnership between the characters of Philip Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood - the reshoot/re-edit committed to the latter. Meanwhile, in both versions of the film, Hawks finds as many opportunities as he can to establish Marlowe's manly virility.

Onscreen (and, skirting the Code, offscreen) Marlowe makes love - in both senses of the word - to numerous characters who appear only fleetingly and functionally in the book. Take, for example, the sexy bookstore employee portrayed by an absolutely smoking Dorothy Malone; her mostly irrelevant scene might even be the best in the movie. For an amusing - and quickly intoxicating - drinking game, try taking a swig every time Marlowe runs into a spicy dame. There are three bookish foxes, giggling cigarette girls, sultry waitresses, and even a female cabbie angling for a lay ("Call me up next time you need a ride." "Day or night?" "Night - I work during the day.").

Contrast this with Chandler's nearly celibate hero - committed to suppressing his base urges for the sake of duty. This reticence is epitomized by Marlowe's refusal to bed his client's nympho daughter, Carmen (played with electric allure by Dorothy Vickers, whom I confess would effortlessly overpower my professionalism were I in Marlowe's gumshoes). Ready, willing, and unencumbered by clothing, she surprises him in his bedroom after a long day of work and he angrily kicks her out. His reaction betrays a beguiling mix of disgust and desire: "The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely." Marlowe doesn't fuck Carmen in the film either, but there we might as well put his reaction down to exhaustion - he's already gotten his rocks off and right now a "big sleep" doesn't sound so bad. At any rate, Hawks is miles away from Chandler on this score.

Screen: The Maltese Falcon (1941)

And what of John Huston, 35-year-old writer/director making his debut with the third cinematic edition The Maltese Falcon in 1941? Actually, Falcon is a remarkably faithful adaptation of the book - partly due to Huston's respect for the material, and partly due to his secretary typing up an initial nearly word-for-word treatment of the novel which his producers mistakenly took for the finished draft. Almost everything in the original story is up there on screen; despite the previous films, this is the one audiences remember, due to Huston's tight direction and the brilliant casting coups of Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet. (I've always felt Mary Astor, while exceedingly assured in her performance, was a bit miscast - she looks too prim for a femme fatale. Elisha Cook, Jr., a reclusive character actor who had to be contacted at his mountain retreat by courier pigeon when the studio needed him, is as perfect here as in The Big Sleep, where he plays another, equally nebbish, yet more noble noir loser.)

Though earlier and less visually evocative, the film is in some ways more palpably "noir" than The Big Sleep. Its universe seems more dangerous, more troubled and the limitations of what we actually see (as with the book, more is revealed by dialogue than action) make us feel like investigators striding side-by-side with Spade. The fact that Falcon's mystery, while complex, is also infinitely less bewildering than Sleep's (where the romance and scene-to-scene intrigue compensate for a byzantine web of connections and incidents) also helps us invest more deeply in the proceedings. After all, there is a clear object of attention (the black falcon statue, apparently concealing a jeweled 15th-century relic), always a plus for a visual medium, and only a few, well-drawn characters are involved in the scheme. Like Orson Welles in Citizen Kane the same year, Huston shoots up at ceilings on set to heighten the feeling of claustrophobia. Here is where the mood most palpably evokes later noirs, despite being less shadowy in its cinematography: visually the movie creates a sense of anxiety and oppression - it's entertaining but not "fun" the same way as Sleep is. And the same goes for its hero.

Huston's and Bogart's conception of the central detective and his world seem far closer to the literary original than Hawks' and Bogart's efforts five years later. If there are differences, they involve Bogie seeming simultaneously less suave and less sinister than the literary Spade (ironically, Bogart seemed too sinister to some at the time, having mostly played hoods up to that point in his career; perhaps today it's our familiarity with his tough-but-good guy roles that swings us in the other direction - we never really suspect he's sincere in his supposedly criminal mechanations). For the most part, Bogart nails Spade's uncanny ability to cavalierly take control in every situation. The actor also captures the character's cold arrogance, revealed in both his unperturbed reaction to his partner's death and his unsympathetic spurning of his clinging, bereaved mistress (who also happened to be his partner's wife). Smart yes, sensitive no.

Mean Streets and Righteous Paths

Spade has been described as amoral. He isn't, not in the most important matters anyway, but his conscience derives more from intellectual principle, and intelligent self-preservation, than any deep, instinctive conviction about right and wrong. That's probably the sharpest, and most intriguing, distinction between Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, at least as originally conceived. Spade is a man almost forcing himself to do good, for uncertain reasons, and against his own inclinations, while Marlowe, much as he might wish to take the easier or more corrupt course seems constitutionally incapable of doing so. To flip Chandler's phrase, in Hammett's world a man must walk the path of righteousness who is not himself righteous.

At the end of Huston's film, Spade describes the titular statue - fraudulent object of criminal attention and cause of several murders - as "the stuff that dreams are made of" (a great line cribbed from Shakespeare's Prospero, and not featured in Hammett's book, which tends to spurn the lofty literary references Chandler burnishes proudly). Spade's words are more true than we may initially suspect - for deep down, his desires and aspirations probably tend more toward the criminal than the lawful. If both Spade and Marlowe are existentialists, Spade's commitment is intellectual while Marlowe's is inherent: one chooses a code to survive the traps he sees other, less cautious individuals fall into; the other lives almost compulsively by a code that puts him at odds with the world yet arises from deep within - from something akin to a soul, which Spade probably wouldn't even recognize. These disparate motivations send them forth on the same perilous path

There, then, is the common bond between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler: they each, in their distinct fashions, fuse a sordid scenario with a sense of right and wrong. Spade and Marlowe are heroes for an age that no longer quite believes in heroes. They are players in a psychodrama that immerses Superego in a sea of Id where it must swim or drown - where triumph over threatening forces feels more like survival than victory. And at the end of the day they must content themselves with faint, fading dreams of black birds, and silver wigs...

The following books helped me write this piece: Creatures of Darkness, by Gene Phillips; Raymond Chandler, by William Marling; That's Hollywood, by Peter Van Gelder; and of course, The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett and The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler.

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The muddled message of The Dark Knight Rises

July 23, 2012, 12:31 pm

≫ Next: Art...on the March! (a visual mixtape)

≪ Previous: Spade & Marlowe, Private Eyes (The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, on page and screen)

This piece, not a review proper but an examination of the film's themes, contains spoilers and is designed for those who have already seen the movie.

Four years ago, when this blog was in its infancy, I offered no less than four pieces touching on The Dark Knight. I was fascinated by the cultural phenomenon it represented, so rare these days. (I don't think even Avatar transcended the cinematic ghetto to the same extent; probably no other film since Titanic has, unless you discount the subsequent disappointment and include The Phantom Menace for its anticipatory buildup.) But I was also compelled by the film itself, which proved a sort of golden exception to my 00s blockbuster aversion. Aesthetically, The Dark Knight shared many of the flaws that turn me off from contemporary popcorn movies (which often seem to be either ashamed of the taste of popcorn or overly enamored of synthetic CGI butter). It took itself and its themes rather seriously; it preferred a muddy, gritty look to visual clarity and beauty; it seemed determined to make a comic-book world "realistic." Yet, in spite of these potential drawbacks, I was fascinated by the tragic, tightly divergent world it drew, as well as by the iconic performance of Heath Ledger as Joker. Even though I did not care for Batman Begins, I was converted to the Nolan Dark Knight camp, and eagerly awaited the next entry in the series. And here it is, cloaked in death like the first movie (following, rather than spurring the hype this time) - and thus assured of notoriety, however undesired by its creators.

The tragedy in Colorado, even more than the death of Ledger, further marks this franchise as a sadly resonant cinematic flagship for the post-9/11 era, an age not just of war on terror but economic decline and social disorientation (increasing connectivity on the one hand, via technology, yet with political fragmentation ever-increasing following the brief flickering of communal feeling in the wake of 2001). Their debt to previous material, so representative of the current cinematic rut (industry executives hit the "reboot" button with the impatience of a frustrated user on an aging PC), also echoes the inability of the American culture at large to reinvent itself for a new era: despite the plethora of new media means the ends still seem awfully familiar. Their visual confusion (thankfully clarified a great deal in this third entry, which finally casts aside the confusing and unappealing Bourne-style fights for clarity and grandeur in a snowy city street battle) also fit into an era haunted by missed opportunities, frustration, and disillusionment; the bright, chipper nineties seem awfully long ago and far away.

But the production history and aesthetic tenor were only the tip of the iceberg; these Batman films proclaimed their cultural relevance quite loudly, casting aside the usual tendency of Hollywood filmmakers to go for a squishy, PC liberalism and embracing a right-wing agenda fervidly if at times somewhat confusingly. Though there were cries of protest when The Dark Knight was interpreted as apologia for President Bush (between the surveillance, rendition, and general use of secrecy and brute force to defeat a crafty terrorist foe, I thought the parallels were fairly undeniable), by Dark Knight Rises, Nolan wants to make sure no one in the audience misses the connection. We got demagoguic populist tirades by the film's villain, Bane, followed by footage of angry crowds invading mansions and beating millionaires. Earlier in the movie, Anne Hathaway's Catwoman (coyly, she's never called such and her "ears" are actually lenses perched up on her head when she's not using them) spouts Robin Hood rhetoric in Bruce Wayne's ear only to come to his aid at film's end when she realizes rich people are people too. Meanwhile an orphanage loses its philanthropic funding when Bruce Wayne's business goes under, overaged orphans flee to the sewer and join a revolutionary army, and Bane's takeover yields kangaroo courts run by the psychotic Scarecrow in which prisoners are either sentenced to "death" or "death by exile."

So then, is Dark Knight Rises a conservative warning against radical rabblerousing, and a gentle reminder to the rich to perform their social duties (not only for the good of humanity, but the presevation of their own privilege)? It would seem so, but Nolan pulls a lot of his punches, something he didn't do in the last Dark Knight. There, the assertion of vigilante prerogative was quite bold, bold enough that it could afford some ambiguity: Batman knew he was doing the right thing, but also that this entailed a distrust of the public and a sacrifice of his own reputation. The authoritarianism had a tragic aura and the fact that Gotham's caped crusader wound up an outcast and martyr made his distrust of the people and assertion of strict law enforcement more palatable to those who might not have agreed with it. The film was honest about its convictions, and also honest about the possibility that they might even be misguided. It all made for a fascinating and compelling mythological allegory. At its center was the ambiguous nature of the public, at once the masters Batman serves, and the sheep he must corral: could they be trusted with their own fate (as the boat scene suggested) or must they be controlled with larger-than-life lies (as the conclusion asserted)?

In Rises, however, Nolan both disenfranchises and absolves Gotham's population, making for a less interesting dynamic on both ends. On the one hand, the heroics belong exclusively to Batman, his ambiguous allies (a friendly woman who turns out to be a villain, and an opponent who winds up in his arms), and especially the police force, which forms a kind of surrogate "people" in this film in a rather odd maneuver. Meanwhile, the only "ordinary people" we see are the cowering crowd at a football game (none of whom seem to be responding positively to Bane's rhetoric), the lovable little orphans, and Catwoman and her girlfriend(?), the film's vision of two broke girls in the big city even though one of them is a brilliant jewel thief with highly-placed underworld (and overworld) connections. By and large, "the people" of the previous film are absent: when we see large groups ransacking the rich enclaves, it's unclear whether they are the prisoners Bane just released, Bane's own henchmen, or ordinary folks. Since we don't see the discontented masses, the film's warnings about populism have a hollow feel. As fellow blogger Bob Clark put it to me recently, "it's demagoguery without the crowds."

This leaves the impression that Nolan wanted to condemn the 99%ers but didn't quite have the guts to do so. Indeed, it's a lot easier to be right-wing about law and order than economics in a mainstream blockbuster and so here we wind up with a bizarre condemnation of populism which lets the populace off the hook. As such, it's perhaps an appropriate reflection of contemporary conservatism's incoherence, as the Tea Party simultaneously tries to appeal to disgruntled voters with libertarian appeals for smaller government, while clinging to a more traditionalist distrust of disorder (represented by the Occupy Wall Street movement last fall). Yet ultimately the Tea Party has succeeded where Dark Knight Rises fails, consolidating its argument (emotionally if not intellectually) by positioning itself as a middle-class social movement, oddly combining the shrill tone and apocalyptic rhetoric of late 60s leftists (for all their condemntation of Obama's links with Saul Alinsky, it's the right that has most astutely adopted the radical agitator's methods) with the keep-America-great, good-old-days mentality of late 60s "Silent Majority." Odd, but effective: many boomers grew up accepting the strategic and symbolic forms of their generation's political upheaval, but ultimately rejected the content in favor of their parents' values.

Claiming the mantle of the middle class is how American conservatism has always reconciled its defense of an elite with the rhetoric of populism (demanded by America's political traditions) yet there's no middle class in Nolan's movies. Choosing a comic book dichotomy of rich and poor, he leaves himself with little ideological ground to stand on (the only possible exception is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's orphan-turned-cop, but the social implications of this are underdeveloped, again because Nolan demands that the cops be both cops and ordinary-people-surrogates at the same time). When the status quo is restored at the end of the movie, we're left wondering exactly what has been resolved. Since Gotham's economic issues were not particularly well-established from the get-go, and since the public was never really shown to "fall for" Bane's rhetoric, we're left with the impression that the egalitarian revolutionary rhetoric of Bane's takeover didn't arise from any actual resentments (the contrary is only subtly suggested by the orphans' migration to the sewers and Catwoman's class warfare), but merely suggested inequality and disenfranchisement where there wasn't any. This easily plays into the rather lazy right-wing notion of revolution and radicalism as smokescreens for naked power-grabs, a rhetorical ploy allowing the more paranoid (or opportunistic) conservatives to paint Obama as at once a cynical, corrupt Chicago manipulator and a hardcore, true-believer Marxian ideologue.

But the notion that revolution is simply gangsterism in radical drag is not only politically cheap (avoiding a real engagement with opposing ideas and methods), it's dramatically not very interesting. True, in the end we find out Bane and his secret master Talia do have a cause but you'd have to re-watch Batman Begins to clarify it beyond simple revenge, and when you do it turns out not to be revolutionary at all; indeed its destructive nihilism makes Batman's noblesse oblige seem positively enlightened. What's missing from the film - suggested by Catwoman's resentments, but left hanging by her lack of any program (except crime) to address her frustrations - is a sense of a coherent opposing ideology which Batman must grapple with. In this it reverses the previous film in which crime was a cover for and demonstration of philosophy; despite his seeming amorality, Joker actually had a very coherent and even compelling point of view which Batman had to battle. Here Bane's (and, implicitly, Gotham's) populism is never given teeth, and hence when Catwoman flees to Florence with a rich husband it seems less like an abandonment of principle than an acceptance of inevitable social reality.

The movie's compromised philosophical standing is a reflection of other compromises: the storytelling seems oddly fragmented - important scenes seem to be missing, and at times even cuts from one shot to another appear abrupt as if something was chopped out; aesthetically, the franchise continues to represent the perversely uncinematic trends in big-budget filmmaking over the past decade. As Richard Brody notes in his brilliant takedown:

[I]t’s neither more nor less than the sum of its parts, all of which are crafted with extraordinary care, none of which suggest spontaneous or surprising leaps of imagination or dazzlements of fantasy. Nolan doesn’t make images; he doesn’t even take pictures. There are no moments of affecting plainness—a person walking unportentously or even moving with any sort of undetermined impulse, instinct, or distraction. (See the head toss at 1:17.) Yet, at the same time, the movie is surprisingly, blandly uninflected, devoid of anything off center or disproportionate—or even incisively angled or hysterically restrained—that would elicit a feeling of synaptic leaps, of subjectivity made physical.

...“The Dark Knight Rises” is not a movie of conspicuous consumption but of conspicuous production, with Nolan himself playing the unfortunate Atlas who bears a cinematic world of dour doings on his lonely shoulders, all the while needing viewers to know how hard he’s working for them. The problem with the movie isn’t any lack of warmth or humanity (qualities that don’t need to be displayed because they’re often effectively evoked through cold and inhuman means) but a lack of wonder. Nolan never seems to surprise himself, and his own inventions have little inspiration but, rather, a sense of a problem solved.

Now, here's the thing: I liked the film, despite agreeing in general terms with Brody's frustration (as I noted below his piece, it seems that big films are trying too hard to be like small ones - in the wrong ways - while small ones aren't trying hard enough to big). I had "a good time at the movies," though The Dark Knight Rises was noticeably less satisfying than its 2008 predecessor. I enjoyed the action set pieces probably more than those in the previous two entries; I thought Bane - contrary to some opinions - was a great villain, with his cool mask and especially actor Tom Hardy's digitally warped Scottish burr; I was very pleasantly surprised by Anne Hathaway's capability (she seemed miscast at first glance, but hers was probably one of the most enjoyable performances in the film); and, however fumbling, the movie's attempts at social relevance were at least compelling (in their failures if nothing else). All in all, I would recommend the movie. Yet when sitting down to write a piece, it was the movie's shortcomings that seemed most worth discussing. That's not entirely over-analytical perversity either - because here we have a franchise that set out from the beginning, and committed itself whole-hog by the second entry, to being about something other than big-screen spectacle. That it falls short doesn't mean it isn't still a fascinating attempt.

Anyway, I invite anyone interested to comment below. Sometimes it seems these Dark Knight films are Rorscasch tests, and I've been startled in the past to hear what others read into it. As far as I know, Nolan himself is not on record with his own views (correct me if I'm wrong) so what he's after, especially in this more muddled film, is a matter of educated speculation. I'd like to hear yours...

For my previous pieces on The Dark Knight: The Dark Knight details my first reaction to the film, The problem with comic books (and movies) investigates my ambivalence about the comic-book trend in movies (this has become even more true for me in recent years), The Dark Knight (revisited) does just that, and Dark Knights for Different Eras explores the similarity between Birth of a Nation and The Dark Knight.

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