Long Pauses

Category: Essays & Reviews

  • Satantango (1994)

    Satantango (1994)

    Dir. by Bela Tarr

    Perhaps the best way to begin this response is to just be out with it: Satantango is not the Greatest. Film. Ever. Also, seeing it projected in 35mm at a good theater and in one sitting (minus two fifteen-minute intermissions) was not one of the defining experiences of my cinema-going life. And unlike Susan Sontag, I’m in no hurry to watch it again, once a year, for the rest of my life. Nevertheless, it was still one of my favorite film moments of 2006. How could it not be? After my only other experience with a Bela Tarr film, I wrote:

    The opening image in Damnation is a remarkable, three-minute shot of coal buckets soaring like cable cars into the horizon. It’s the high point of the film, I think, because it lacks context. We are forced to sit patiently (or not so patiently), listening to the mechanical hum, watching as the buckets come and go, suspended in a moment of Gertrude Stein-like presence: “A bucket is a bucket is a bucket.” The image is alive and contradictory and frustrating and beautiful. By the end of the film, though — after watching our hero repeatedly fail in his attempts to capture love, and, finally, giving up in his efforts entirely — those buckets have become just another symbol of meaningless motion.

    I felt the same frustrations throughout the seven-and-a-half hours of Satantango. There’s an odd tension generated by the collision of Tarr’s form/aesthetic (long takes, slow tracking shots, expressionless faces in close-up) and his vision of the world, which strikes me as pessimistic in the extreme. The influence of Tarkovsky is so heavy, I can’t help but compare the two, and what most fascinates me about the comparison is how Tarkovsky’s films, even at their most bleak (Ivan’s Childhood, Nostalghia), feel guided by a generous (spiritual?) wisdom, while Tarr’s seem to have been constructed in Nature’s laboratory. In contrast to Tarkovsky the Mystic, I imagine Tarr as the Skeptical Scientist, training his eye on his human subjects, determined to prove his cynical hypotheses.

    Take, for example, the story of Estike, a young girl who is pulled from a sanitarium by her mother and brought back home, where she suffers all manner of neglect and abuse. We meet her just as she’s being tricked out of her last few cents by a thieving older brother, and then, over the next forty minutes or so, Satantango becomes her film. We see her act out in a desperate effort to take control of some aspect of her life, wrestling with her cat in one of the most disturbing film sequences I have ever seen. (“I am stronger than you,” she hisses at the terrified cat.) We see her make one last attempt at human contact, but, cursed and rejected, she is sent running off alone into the dark woods. We see her walk, without blinking, down an empty road, and this time we watch her even more closely; Tarr holds her face in focus for minutes at a time (“a face is a face is a face”). And then we see her die. We watch as she curls up beside her dead cat and eats the same rat poison that killed it.

    Before she dies, Estike imagines an angel looking down on her with sympathy. Right now, as I struggle to find the next sentence — and despite the many misgivings I’ve already expressed — I’m aware of a tenderness in Tarr’s gaze that I didn’t experience during the film itself. I keep thinking of another shot, a minutes-long close-up of Estike’s face as she peers through a window at the drunken townspeople dancing in a pub. Why has she been rejected by this human community? Is she too pure? Too uncorruptable? (Are these even the appropriate questions to be asking of her?) And, even more importantly, does this human community have access to any means of redemption, whether transcendent or humanist? My sense is that it does not, but I’m feeling an urge to reacquaint myself with Tarkovsky’s Ivan, Bresson’s Mouchette, and the Dardennes’ Rosetta to test my own hypothesis.

    Satantango is, inevitably, a defining experience in one respect: As a self-proclaimed lover of boring art films and a proselyte for the long take, I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to immerse myself in that aesthetic for an entire day. (I’m reminded of a friend in Toronto who recounted Andrea Picard‘s response when he expressed his misgivings about spending a weekend with Warhol’s Empire. “But what happens?” he asked. “Life happens,” she said.) Like the coal buckets in Damnation, the opening shot of cows being loosed into the fields in Satantango is as beautifully strange and breath-taking as any image I saw all year. Following it with a hundred more long takes pushes, in interesting ways, the limits of the affect. At times I became fatigued by it all and began praying for a cut. But two or three shots later I would become mystified again. I’d be curious to get the DVDs and hold the “boring” (in the best sense) shots up beside the “boring” (in the worst sense) shots to get a clearer sense of the distinction. Is it a matter of aesthetics? (Is beauty more compelling?) Is it a function of narrative? (The cat-wrestling scene was certainly the most heart-pounding.) Is it an elemental question of form? (Given similar content and cinematographic style, how would variations to mise-en-scene, for example, affect our viewing pleasure?)

  • The Black Dahlia (2006)

    The Black Dahlia (2006)

    Dir. by Brian De Palma

    De Palma’s introduction of “The Black Dahlia” (the character, not the film) is a show-stopper. As I recall, the camera begins more or less at eye level, following police officers Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) as they race toward a rowhouse in pursuit of criminals. Rather than going into the building, though, the camera instead floats up and over it, pausing for only a few seconds as it spots the Dahlia off in the far distance. There she is: the nude, disemboweled, disfigured body; the image that, if you’ve ever seen it in oft-duplicated black and white, is likely seared into your memory. (Here’s the image I first saw in a bookstore copy of Hollywood Babylon when I was way too young. Scroll down. Warning: graphic content.)

    A woman spots the Dahlia’s remains, screams, and then runs into traffic, crying for help. De Palma at first appears to be following her. “Twenty minutes into a film called The Black Dahlia we’re finally going to get to her story,” we think, relieved. But De Palma’s not interested in the frantic woman; he doesn’t appear, even, to be concerned with the victim. Instead, his camera, in a continuing, unbroken shot, chases after a bicyclist, who leads the crane back down and around the building, back, eventually, to Bucky and Lee, our main characters. Another five minutes or so pass before there is any mention of the poor woman whose mutilated body lies in the grass a few hundred feet away.

    I’m nowhere near deciding yet whether or not The Black Dahlia is good, but it’s certainly among the strangest and most fascinating Hollywood films I’ve seen in quite some time. As we were walking out of the theater last night, Joanna asked the key question, and I’m still wrestling with it: “That was supposed to be a satire, right?” I’m not sure if “satire” is the right word, exactly, but The Black Dahlia is self-aware to the point of distraction. (Poor Scarlett Johansson comes close to out-Showgirls-ing Elizabeth Berkley.) I haven’t done much reading about the film yet, but I do recall seeing one comparison to A History of Violence, which seems about right. Like Cronenberg, De Palma has made a decent-enough genre film that comments constantly on the genre itself — not in a snarky, wink-wink way but, rather, with a bit of bite.

    Noir has always been ripe for psychoanalytic readings, as have many of De Palma’s films, especially those that are more explicitly Hitchcock-inspired. What I find so interesting about The Black Dahlia is its making real and visible what has been suppressed in so many of the films that preceded it. In one sense, The Black Dahlia isn’t about “The Black Dahlia” at all. (That was Joanna’s main disappointment. She wanted an account of the murder that stayed within the wide bounds of established fact, and became frustrated when the film didn’t match her expectations.) And yet, one could also argue that every noir is about “The Black Dahlia” — namely, she is an embodiment (with all of the troubling connotations attached to that word in this context) of noir desire. She’s a hyper-sexualized femme fatale, dangerous and beautiful, the subject of our voyeuristic gaze, a helpless victim and sly manipulator, and a site of horrific violence. Now, in 2006, “The Black Dahlia” is also infected with sensationalism. She’s not just a murder victim; she’s the murder victim who was photographed and whose photographs have entered the public consciousness. She’s a media event. (Just imagine what Nancy Grace would have done with this story.)

    Traditionally, Film Noir heroes have been haunted by this repressed desire. (Hell, some would argue that this particular ghost infests all of cinema. I’m talkin’ to you, Mulvey.) Well, repression be damned. In the closing moments of The Black Dahlia, when Bucky returns for one final reunion with Johansson’s icy blonde Kay, De Palma kicks the proverbial psychic doors wide open. Bucky, who has been betrayed at every turn and who has just committed a sex-charged act of violence himself, sees the high-contrast, severed remains of “The Black Dahlia” everywhere he turns. In what I can only assume is meant to be a joke, he’s rescued from his reverie, finally, by Kay’s none-too-subtle invitation to “come inside.” I thought it was funny, at least.

  • History and Politics

    History and Politics

    On Friday afternoon I met Girish for a screening of These Girls, Tahani Rached’s documentary about a small community of Egyptian teenagers who live on the streets of Paris. They survive on discarded food and pass their days sniffing glue, taking pills, avoiding arrest, fighting, and raising the small children who are only a few years younger than they themselves. Rached focuses most of her attention on four or five young girls, each of whom is trapped both by poverty and by the Islamic laws and customs that leave women at the mercy of men. Abused by their fathers, they turn to the streets where they’re abused again by the packs of homeless boys. One girl already has two children, another is pregnant, and several have been deliberately scarred with slashes across their cheeks.

    These Girls is a difficult film to watch. Rached avoids over-sentimentalizing her subject, and, frankly, the girls have been hardened to the point that, at times, I found it difficult to muster the appropriate sympathy for them. (I say that with embarrassment.) I had to leave twenty minutes before the film ended, so I’ll hold off on any kind of final evaluation. These Girls has been selected for the New York Film Festival and, if properly marketed, has the potential to find the same audience that went to see Born into Brothels.

    I scheduled These Girls mostly because it was paired with Toy, Waguih, a short essay film in which the filmmaker, Namir Abdel Messeeh, interviews his father, who forty years earlier had been arrested in Egypt for his activities with communist resistance movements. After five years in prison, he broke ties with his Leftist past, emigrated with his wife to France, and once there raised his family into a respectable, white collar world. At a retirement party, Messeeh’s father is applauded for his decades of quiet devotion to the job, and it’s clearly that dichotomy that so fascinates (and, perhaps, frustrates) his son. How could a political militant who survived torture and forced marches through the Sahara abandon his “principles” for a life of capitalist comfort? And how could he remain silent about the issue for so many years, not telling even his own son the details of his past life?

    I know too little about Egypt’s history to even attempt an analysis of Messeeh’s film, but it’s the kind of political movie I like best: a meditation on memory and on the waves of personal consequence that ripple through history. It’s what cinema can do that a written essay can’t. There’s something in the aesthetic experience of witnessing Messeeh’s father’s furrowed brow and pronounced lower lip (his son has the exact same lip) that encapsulates the ambivalences and dichotomies of his experience. Toy, Waguih isn’t Night and Fog, but it’s a deceptively complex and urgent piece. I liked it quite a lot.

    Already, I’m enjoying the heavy concentration of avant-garde films that I’ve scheduled this year, but I’m at a loss as to how I should go about blogging them. For now, I’ll stick to those pieces that impressed me in a way I feel capable of describing.

    Wavelengths 1 ended with Un Pont sur la Drina by Xavier Lukomski, which consists of five or six long (long in terms of both distance and time) static shots of the bridge that spans the Drina river in Višegrad. The film opens and closes with lines from Ivo Andric’s novel The Bridge on the Drina, lines that note the location’s national importance as a site of conflict. The film’s soundtrack is a mix of diegetic sound (wind, distant voices, occasional hints of traffic) and recorded testimony from a war crimes trial in which a young man describes the long nights he and his neighbors spent pulling out, searching, and burying the hundreds of mutilated bodies that floated under the bridge from battles upstream.

    Two days and six film programs later, I find myself thinking often of Un Pont sur la Drina. In one sense it’s a film about that uncanny experience we’ve all had as we’ve crossed into the Tower of London or walked across the battlefields of Gettysburg or viewed the shorelines near Normandy — the sense that we’ve stumbled upon a site that is simultaneously past and present. Lukomski’s long takes, which on one level are fairly innocuous landscape portraits, become haunted in some way. Again, unfortunately, I know too little about the history of the Balkans to risk specific analysis. I was, however, struck by the testimony itself, which is translated to French in the soundtrack (so that we hear the man’s actual voice for only a few seconds when he begins each new statement) and then translated again to English in the subtitles. That in itself is an interesting commentary, I think, on the impact of globalization on national identity, an idea I’ll likely return to in my next post, when I discuss Sissako’s Bamako.

  • Three for Three

    Three for Three

    Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable result of paring down my schedule from 44 films in 2005 (only 35 of which I actually saw) to “only” 33 this year, but my sense while researching and planning over the past weeks was that TIFF’s lineup is stronger, top to bottom, this time around than in previous years. I’m a bid disappointed that neither of my favorite filmmakers, Claire Denis and Hou Hsiao-hsien, has a new film here, but, otherwise, I feel good about all of my picks. None was chosen simply to fill a hole or out of convenience. None feels like a risk. And so far, three films in, my excitement over the quality of this year’s lineup has been confirmed.

    After spending two weeks meticulously filling in my TIFF spreadsheet, I was surprised to find Climates, the latest film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, at the top of the heap — surprised, mostly, because I’d never seen any of his previous work. I rented Distant (2002) last week and was completely captivated by it. Even before reaching the scenes that make explicit reference to Tarkovsky, I was smiling at the more subtle allusions — the clanging wind chimes, the mothers and sons, the struggling, alienated artists. How could I not love a film that was so obviously an homage to my all-time favorite, Mirror?

    Climates didn’t move me quite so powerfully, but it’s a very good film nonetheless. Ceylan and his wife (Ebru Ceylan) play the starring roles, a couple in the final throes of a failing relationship. He is older, a university professor struggling to finish his thesis; she is an art designer working to establish a career in television and film production. The film opens as they’re breaking up and then follows him over the next few months, as he attempts to begin the next — and hopefully more satisfying — phase of his life.

    Climates includes three or four key scenes — a daydream at the beach, a night in a hotel, and a brilliant sex scene — that will certainly be among my favorite moments of any film I see this year. Often employing incredibly shallow focus, Ceylan taps into that transcendent Tarkovsky “magic” by shattering his images into abstraction and, in doing so, offering shards of subjective emotion. At times, I was reminded of Denis’s sex scenes in Friday Night, but I haven’t decided yet if she and Ceylan are working toward similar ends. After I get home, I hope to give more thought and time to Climates, which, like Atom Egoyan’s Calendar, also uses photography and ancient religious architecture to raise questions about memory and national identity. (That last phrase is such an art film cliche [or maybe an art film criticism cliche], but I’m confident it’s true in this case, and it will make this film fun to write about and discuss.)

    12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu) is set on December 22, 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the overthrow of communism in Romania. A small town news anchor celebrates the event by inviting two men to join him for a live, on-camera discussion of their experiences in 1989, and he frames the chat with this central question: “Was there or was there not an actual revolution in their home town?” (That question, actually, is a more accurate and literal translation of the film’s original title.) Did anyone participate, locally, in the dangerous rebellion against authority, or did they simply join the national celebration after the revolution was complete?

    12:08 East of Bucharest is neatly divided into two acts. In the first we meet the three main characters: a drunken school teacher, a retired principal, and the television “journalist.” The film works so well largely due to the lead performances, each of which is sympathetic and often hilarious. Porumboiu, an efficient storyteller, gives us snapshots of each man’s life and of life, in general, in 21st century Romania, begging the larger, more important question: what is the legacy of the revolution, and who, if anyone, benefited from it the most? When the three characters finally come together for the shooting of the TV program, the film shifts gears, and the final 45 minutes or so play more or less in real time. Their discussion, including the comments of call-in viewers, is pointed and at times even touching. It is also really, really funny. 12:08 East of Bucharest lends itself to over-simplified discussions of postmodernism and history, establishing “facts” before quickly dismantling them again as distorted and subjective memories. For every history of the revolution there is a counter-history, but Porumboiu, I think, finally comes down on the side of “the people,” in a liberal, humanist, and barely-political-at-all sense. For that reason — along with the laugh-out-loud comedy — I can see this becoming one of those films that, if properly marketed, is the foreign language film talked up by Americans who see only one or two foreign language films a year.

    Judging by the snores, giggles, and sighs of frustration I heard around me in the theatre, I’m likely among the minority when I call Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina) a stunning piece of filmmaking. It is the prototype of the “boring art film.” By my count, in fact, there are only fourteen camera setups in the entire movie, and they’re employed with an almost geometric rigor. By the fourth sequence in the film, its rhythms become obvious — they’re observable and dissectable. I’m tempted even to plot out the film’s form on graph paper. But the strict construction is only so interesting and effective because Encina maintains a constant tension between it and what really drives her film: the mysterious grief and love shared by the main characters, an aging couple who await the return of their son from war.

    I use the word “mysterious” not because the couple’s love and grief are unmotivated. The plot, spare as it is, explains their son’s reasoning for going to war and it informs us that the man and woman have been together for decades. Rather, the “mystery” of the film is the mystery that haunts and shapes so much of human experience. It’s our strange tendency to deflect grief by talking about anything — anything — other than that which grieves us. It’s the rituals of intimacy. It’s the pendulum swings between hope and despair. I have a lot more to say about this film, and look forward to doing so when I have more time.

  • Collins and Jost

    I’m treading in deep and unfamiliar waters here. I’ve seen maybe thirty or forty films that could be considered avant-garde, and I have only the sketchiest understanding of the history and evolution of the genre. (Is “genre” even the right word? Surely not. And is there a useful distinction to be made between avant-garde and experimental films? Hopefully I’ll learn a thing or two during today’s blog-a-thon.) My goals for this post are simply to illustrate a particular formal connection I’ve noticed between two films, Phil Collins’ they shoot horses and Jon Jost’s Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses), and to begin exploring the potential political implications of that formal device.

    First, the films . . .

    They Shoot Horses

    they shoot horses (2004)

    dir. by Phil Collins

    they shoot horses is currently installed at the Tate Britain in London. I saw it there when we visited in April. Or, to be more precise, I saw twenty random minutes of it — or roughly 5% of its 6 hour, 40 minute run time. The installation itself is a room of approximately twenty feet squared, consisting of only a sound system and two projectors positioned at ninety degrees relative to one another. Both project directly onto the opposite walls, presenting viewers with two video images that, consequently, are also at ninety degrees relative to one another. Imagine standing in a large, mostly-darkened room, staring directly into one corner of it, and having your peripheral vision on both sides engulfed by competing images. Graphically, the images are similar — both are long shots of people dancing against a pink and orange striped background (see above) — but the dancers and their movements vary from side to side.

    Gallery patrons hear they shoot horses before they see it; a din of break beats and pop vocals carries through much of the Tate’s contemporary art wing. In early 2004 Collins filmed two groups of teens in Ramallah as they danced all day without a break, and his installation is, in part, a visceral recreation of that moment. The low frequency thud of the disco music is as essential to the form and experience of they shoot horses as the piercing noise is to Michael Snow’s Wavelength. The only reprieves from the music come when the dance marathon is interrupted temporarily by occasional power outages and by calls to prayer from a nearby mosque. The dancers appear to have been given little instruction other than to dance and to stay more or less in the frame. I wasn’t able to watch enough of the film to describe Collins’ use of cuts (I never saw any), but the film reads as two simultaneous and continuous takes. I should also mention that, if I lived in London, I would gladly spend an entire day watching the film from start to finish. It has a simple but startling beauty.

    Plain Talk and Common Sense

    Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987)

    Dir. by Jon Jost

    Jon Jost has described Plain Talk and Common Sense (Uncommon Senses) (1987) as a “State of the Nation discourse.” Filmed in the wake of Reagan’s 525 to 13 electoral vote trouncing of Walter Mondale, Plain Talk is a critical portrait of an America in the final throes of its decades-long ideological battle with communism. Jost systematically appropriates and deconstructs American symbols throughout the film, beginning with an opening shot of leaves of grass and ending in a grain field located at the geographical center of the nation, a grain field whose amber waves happen to flow over missile silos.

    Plain Talk is an essay film that uses what I (perhaps naively) consider to be avant-garde techniques: collage (both images and sound), stop-motion photography, soundtrack manipulation, and a general preference for abstraction over narrative. Despite that preference, however, the film is rigorously structured like a traditional essay, with an introduction and nine chapters, each one building on the argument as developed in the preceding chapter. Plain Talk, as Jost writes:

    asks questions, poses riddles, and prods the viewer to ponder along with the filmmaker on the meaning of it all. And, in typical American fashion, at end it plops the matter directly in the individual’s lap, following in the manner of Walt Thoreau [sic]: in the recurring parlance of the times, “You are what you eat,” or what you do. America is, in sum, what Americans do, and let be done in their name.

    Plain Talk is a bit uneven. Two of the chapters, “Inside/Outside,” a send-up of Cold War America’s military and technology fetishes, and “Songs,” a travelogue of industrial excess, are more effective in theory than in practice. But I’m a great fan of the film, in general. “We hear the sound ‘America,’” Jost says in Chapter 3, “Crosscurrents,” “and instantly, without thought, our minds fill with received images.” Plain Talk is a clever, potent, and — two decades later — timely intervention that forces viewers to reconsider, thoughtfully, our images of America and our role in creating and propagating them.

    The Long Take

    Chapter 7 of Plain Talk, “Americans,” is a portrait series. Each is a medium shot against a black backdrop (see above); the framing erases all visual context, leaving viewers to deduce the subject’s location and social standing from other clues, such as accent or clothes or ambient sounds (street noise in the financial district of San Francisco, chirping insects in the rural South). Although no single portrait lasts for more than twenty or thirty seconds, the shots feel longer because Jost gives his subjects no direction. They step in front of the camera and do what they’ve been trained to do over a lifetime: they introduce themselves and smile directly into the lens, slyly posing to offer the camera their best sides. But when nothing happens, panic sets in. Their eyes begin to dart from the lens to Jost, back to the lens, back to Jost. Eventually the pose drops and we get a quick glimpse of the “real” face. (The screen captures don’t do them justice, but my two favorite examples are the woman in the left image and the man in the right.)

    they shoot horses has a similar effect. Over the course of the film, as Collins’ dancers become more and more exhausted from the marathon, their attitudes toward one another and toward the camera change in waves. They get bored, they lean against the wall or sit on the floor cross-legged, they flirt, they tap their toes and rock absent-mindedly, and then, from time to time, they find new stores of energy and return to their “performance,” dancing like the teenagers they see every day on satellite television.

    Jost’s film is explicitly political. It’s a Leftist critique of American military and economic imperialism, and of the degradation of American democracy. Its final chapter, “Heart of the Country,” takes place in the population center of the nation, a specific geographical location that, as Jost points out, was determined by statisticians and cartographers who worked from the assumption that every citizen exerts equal weight/power. Plain Talk attacks that assumption at every turn. Though much less explicit, they shoot horses offers a similar critique by finding a formal, egalitarian beauty in the citizens of a Palestinian city under Israeli occupation. I like the description in the Tate’s program: “The work is concerned with heroism and collapse and reveals beauty surviving under duress.”

    What most interests me — and what I lack a vocabulary to properly describe — is the direct connection between the form and political content in both of these films. That brief frisson that occurs when the pose drops — when a person who lives in an image-marketed and -mediated culture suddenly finds herself set adrift in the semiological flux — that moment, I think, is an instance of political resistance. It’s a temporary escape from the commodification and reification of our images and of our selves.

  • Birth (2004)

    Birth (2004)

    Dir. by Jonathan Glazer

    The first image in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth is a nearly two-minute, uninterrupted high-angle shot of a jogger making his way through snow-covered Central Park. The camera follows a few steps behind him, floating dreamily twenty or thirty feet over his head. It trails the runner for several hundred meters, over hills, around bends, and, finally, under a quiet overpass before momentarily losing sight of him in the darkness. The first cut is to the opening title: Birth, rendered in an ornate, story-book script.

    Like most film viewers, apparently, I paid little attention to Birth during its theatrical run. What I remember of its marketing campaign cast the film as another Nicole Kidman prestige picture, one of the countless many that have appeared, with assembly line-like regularity, in recent years. My expectations, though, were completely undone by that first shot. While watching Birth‘s opening sequence I was struck by a feeling I’ve experienced again and again in the months since, as I’ve caught up with Glazer’s first feature film, Sexy Beast, and with his many television advertisements and music videos: I was watching a filmmaker whose mise-en-scene was purposeful, controlled, surprising, and stylized (in the sense that “stylized” is now commonly used to describe films by Quentin Tarrantino and Wes Anderson, for example) but always in the service of story and character. I trusted Glazer immediately and completely.

    I’m harping on this one shot because, having now seen Birth three or four times, and having watched the opening moments of the film more times still, I’m fascinated by the durability of its effect. The high angle perspective makes the jogger a small, dark (he’s dressed in all black), and indefinable mark against the white snow. It’s barely color photography at all, in fact — the palette is all shades of gray and beige. This, combined with Alexandre Desplat’s “Prelude,” puts us in a world that isn’t quite real. It’s more Chris Van Allsburg than Martin Scorsese. Central Park is recast as the Grimm Brothers’ forest; I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find the Billy Goats’ troll or a Frog Prince hiding in the shadows beneath that bridge.

    Like all good fairy tales, Birth is a dreamscape, really. Fantasy and suppressed desire are manifest in symbol-heavy ghosts and magic. Reason surrenders its claims to knowledge. Emotion reigns. The two films I think of most often when watching Birth are Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and David Cronenberg’s The Brood, both sublime and uncanny horror stories in their own right. Glazer’s debt to Kubrick is all over Birth — from the slow tracking shots and symmetrical compositions to the spanking scene, which is lifted, whole hog, from Barry Lyndon — but it’s their shared interest in the psychology of sex, death, and human subjectivity that links Glazer’s film most closely with that other Kidman-as-impossibly-wealthy-Manhattanite movie.

    Birth is, I think, a curious reimagining of the ideas that propel The Brood, the 1979 splatterfest in which an experimental form of self-actualization therapy gives birth, quite literally, to the anger and self-hatred that, until that point, had been safely repressed by each analysand’s super-ego. Always part satirist, Cronenberg treats 1970s psychotherapy with suspicion (if not downright contempt), but, as has become his trademark, the real horror of The Brood is his qrotesque rendering of deep-seated human anxiety — and, more specifically, anxiety about death, bound as it is to the corporeal, “flesh”-iness of our always-decaying bodies. (Forgive me if that all sounds obnoxiously pedantic. This notorious image from The Brood is more to-the-point.)

    The basic premise of Birth is simple enough: a decade after her husband’s death, a young woman meets a ten-year-old who claims to be his reincarnation. Although the boy is certainly a more rounded character than the knife-wielding homunculi of The Brood, he shares their function as a materialization of repressed trauma. (He doesn’t just serve this function, of course. It’s to the film’s credit that, while remaining largely within Anna’s subjectivity — at least from that amazing opera scene on — Glazer and his cowriters have built nice parallels into the story in order to emphasize the similarities between Anna and the young Sean. Their visits to Clara and Clifford’s apartment is one good example.)

    Entering spoilers territory . . .

    That the central mystery of Birth — is the boy her dead husband or isn’t he? — can be explained away by an important plot point is, impressively, both utterly beside the point and exactly what makes the entire premise of the film so damn interesting. Had Birth ended without revealing the dead Sean’s betrayal of Anna — had the mystery simply been left unresolved or resigned to the realm of the supernatural — Glazer’s portrait of mourning and grief would have been no less impressive or terrifying. (It likely would have become even more dreamlike, veering closer to the territory of a film like Jean-Paul Civeyrac’s À travers la forêt.) As it is, the secret ultimately remains hidden from Anna, so her character, at least when viewed from within the film’s world, is unaffected by any alterations to this particular plot point. Or think of it this way: Kidman would perform Anna exactly the same way, regardless of whether or not those letters existed.

    But the letters do exist. And although we never get a significant peek into them, we can make certain safe assumptions about their contents. They’re written by a woman desperately in love with her husband. They touch on the mundane details of the couple’s domestic life together. (“This is my desk. This is where I worked.”) They’re frank enough and intimate enough to include details about a secret romp on their brother-in-law’s couch. They express her regret over the amount of time they are forced to spend apart and her desire to be with him more often. (I wonder, even, if the very act of writing those letters could be a sublimation of Anna’s insecurities and suspicions about Sean’s fidelity.)

    I’ve always read Eyes Wide Shut as a hopeless attempt by a man to regain the fictional unity of his own identity after having it exploded by a wife who, as is always the case, turns out to be not at all the woman he had imagined her to be. Birth, I think, is essentially the same story. By way of comparison to another “trick” film, at the end of Birth the “real” Sean remains as much a mystery to us as Keyser Soze. Anna so quickly and so easily falls in love with the young Sean not because he’s a manifestation of her dead husband but because he so effortlessly performs a role that is wholly the work of Anna’s imagination. She has conjured an idealized version of Sean through the magical incantation of her love letters. “I can’t be him because I’m in love with Anna,” the boy tells a police officer, adrift in his own impressive whirl of identity confusion.

    My only complaint with Birth is its relatively clunky ending. The final image of Anna wailing in the surf is like a mash-up of The Awakening and The 400 Blows but without the inevitability or rightness of either. I wish it ended, instead, like Eyes Wide Shut, at the precise moment when all the horrors exposed in the film are once again safely repressed by a single word. In Kubrick’s film, the tension is superficially resolved in a toy shop, where Alice restores Bill’s sense of himself by simply telling him they should “fuck.” In Birth, Anna and her future husband negotiate in a corporate boardroom, where she surrenders all of her desires to more acceptable cultural norms. “I want to have a good life, and I want to be happy,” she says. “That’s all I want. Peace.”

    I wish the film ended here. “Okay,” he says. Cut to black. And like magic, the monsters disappear.

  • Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Abel Ferrara’s Battle with the Irrational

    Religious faith is utterly irrational. By calling myself a Christian, I claim to believe at least this: that we are all born into a fallen world and that each of us is in need of grace, an undeserved forgiveness possible only through the sacrifice of Christ. It makes no sense. From a rational perspective, it’s not terribly different from a belief in “Leda and the Swan” or the practices of New Age mysticism. All might otherwise be described as man-invented responses to the irrational tendencies of human experience — things like creativity, desire, curiosity, grief, suffering, injustice, and good ol’ existential dread. Faith offers a kind of all-encompassing framework of understanding, a culturally- and historically rich narrative that provides, at the very least, the appearance of meaning, even if not Meaning itself.

    To watch the body of Abel Ferrara’s films, as I’ve tried my best to do over the last month and a half, is to see a man wrestling obsessively — sadomasochistically, even — with the Irrational. The stylized violence, the scenery-chewing performances, the gratuitous and exploitative female nudity — all are window dressing. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the very possibility of grace. If looking at a woman lustfully is ultimately (or Ultimately) no different from committing adultery itself — if, in other words, each of us is equally depraved, equally culpable — then all of us are trapped in a world very much like Ferrara’s, where good and bad have blended to a shade of deep, dark gray.

    It’s this quality, I suspect, that led Brad Stevens to name his critical biography Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision, and it’s also what other participants in today’s blog-a-thon have called Ferrara’s “humanism.” I don’t think humanist is the right word for him, though. His films, in fact, seem to me to be deeply cynical. While his characters often act badly with the very best intentions — I’m thinking of Tom Berrenger’s washed up boxer in Fear City, Christopher Walken’s Robin Hood-like drug lord in King of New York, and the husband and wife of ‘R X-Mas — and while Ferrara refuses to rule over them as a moral judge (and prevents us from doing so as well), he most definitely situates them in a world corrupted tragically and completely by our cultural institutions (capital, politics, and religion, to name just three) and by man’s basest instincts. It’s an ugly, ugly place.

    But despite its ugliness, Ferrara’s world is occasionally illuminated by brief moments of redemption, and I’m tempted to say that, in each case, its an explicitly transcendent, transhuman redemption. These are Ferrara’s encounters with the Irrational. The most obvious and affecting example is the bad lieutenant, who, after witnessing the victimized nun’s extraordinary forgiveness of her attackers, confronts the very Source of her strength before performing a charitable act of grace himself. That same moment is reenacted in The Mother of Mirrors, the film-within-a-film in Dangerous Game. Sarah Jennings’ (Madonna) character has experienced a kind of religious epiphany that has allowed her to reform, and in doing so she has brought into relief the depravity of the world she and her husband have created. There is a specifically Christian character to these transformations in Ferrara’s work, just as there’s a specifically Christian character to, say, Bresson’s and the Dardennes’.

    Briefly, I want to add, also, that I think this battle with the Irrational is part of what makes Ferrara an American filmmaker. We are a confused and compromised lot, are we not? Two centuries later, our political rhetoric remains heavy with allusions to the protestant work ethic, to the Deistic ideals of the Enlightenment, and to the One God under which our Nation stands. Meanwhile, we consume, degrade, exploit, and dehumanize with the best of ’em. Which is probably why we’re so fond of transcendent redemption as a concept — so much so that we’ve made it a hallmark of American tradition. What I most appreciate about Ferrara is the messy collision of his cynicism and, for lack of a better word, his faith: grace is never cheap in his world, and that’s as it should be.

    Until this point in my post, I’ve carefully avoided making any aesthetic judgments on Ferrara’s work. Counting the early shorts, I think I’ve now seen fourteen of his films, and I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s a director of genuine importance whose films are almost all fundamentally flawed. Bad Lieutenant is, I think, his most coherent and best picture; Dangerous Game is his most interesting; and King of New York is his most traditionally entertaining. Ms. 45 is probably the best low-budget exploitation film I’ve ever seen (for whatever that’s worth); and, given a choice of which of his films to rewatch tonight, I’d pick New Rose Hotel without a moment of hesitation.

    If I were a bigger fan of Ferrara’s work, I’m sure I could put together a well-reasoned apology for the pacing problems, the tone problems, the performance problems, and the basic narrative problems that characterize, to various degrees, all of his films. (Even as a fan, though, I doubt I could justify his misogyny — I’m talking to you, Cat Chaser.) Part of me wishes he would find a strong-willed producer and editor, people willing to reign him in just enough to un-kink the various lines of thought that wind through his work. The ideas are compelling, and the execution is occasionally stunning. (I really, really love those long takes in Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game, especially the scene between Zoe Lund and Harvey Keitel, and Madonna’s “What do you want from me?” moment in front of Eddie Israel’s camera.) Until that happens, I’ll continue seeing his new films and, I suspect, continue being frustrated by them.

    See also:

    [with more to come]

  • Code Unknown (2000)

    Code Unknown (2000)

    Dir. by Michael Haneke

    “The guard is down and the mask is off, even more than in lone bedrooms where there’s a mirror. People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.”
    — Walker Evans

    “Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
    — Susan Sontag

    Twice during Code Unknown, director Michael Haneke cuts together montages of still photographs. The first is a series of grisly images from war-torn Kosovo; the second is a collection of portraits taken surreptitiously (if we are to believe the film’s narrative) on the Paris Metro. The second montage is actually the work of documentary photographer Luc Delahaye, but his obvious forebear is Walker Evans, whose hidden camera work on Depression-era New York subway trains resulted in the book, Many Are Called (1966).

    In “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” Susan Sontag calls Evans an heir to Walt Whitman’s “euphoric” humanism. “To photograph is to confer importance,” she writes, and Evans’ photos, or so the argument goes, democratize their subjects by leveling the playing field — “leveling up,” Sontag notes. Viewed through his lens, the Victorian homes of Boston are exactly as beautiful, as ugly, and as important as the dusty cotton towns of south Alabama. Evans’ images are, in his own words, “literate, authoritative, transcendent.” Sontag continues:

    The moral universe of the 1930s being no longer ours, these adjectives are barely credible today. Nobody demands that photography be literate. Nobody can imagine how it could be authoritative. Nobody understands how anything, least of all a photograph, could be transcendent.

    I doubt I’ll be the only participant in today’s blog-a-thon to call upon Saint Susan. They’re too obvious a pairing, Sontag and Haneke — sharp intellects, determined moralists, and impossibly talented craftsmen, both. The question that’s nagging at me, though, is whether Haneke’s films, in general, and Code Unknown, specifically, achieve the egalitarian aims for which Sontag praises Evans. As opposed to the streams of self-canceling images that spray from television, Haneke’s films are, perhaps, as hyperselected as moving images can be — I admire his precise direction like I admire the prose of a great essayist — but to what ends, exactly?

    Haneke’s use of Delahaye’s “L’Autre” photos is, like so much of the film, a highly self-conscious gesture. In this allusion to Sontagian (?) romanticism, he critiques by juxtaposition the kind of contemporary, sado-pornographic photojournalism typified by George’s Kosovo pictures. (George’s dry voice-over reading of a letter to Anne as the montage of dismembered bodies and grieving faces spools by is another nice — if heavy — touch.) By comparison, the black and white portraits of disinterested subway riders are more artful and ambiguous, and, therefore, one might argue, more essentially human. After seriously considering the term for several years now, I still don’t understand what “transcendent” means, precisely, but I know that the second photo montage and the shots of deaf students drumming are my favorite moments in Code Unknown, perhaps because they short-circuit, temporarily, my intellectual processes during a film that, at times, feels too much like a high-minded parable.

    Haneke’s allusion to Evans’ literacy, authority, and transcendence is problematized, though, by the scene in which we watch George take his subway photos. When he sits down in front of an attractive young woman, their knees only inches apart, it feels like a predatory act, one nearly as taut and tense as Anne’s later confrontation with an aggressive teenager. Again, the scene is highly self-conscious. George’s camera is Haneke’s camera, and it’s also every other camera documenting and fragmenting our lives (and it’s a weapon and a phallus, to boot — quite a potent symbol, this camera).

    “People’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway,” Evans tells us, but why should we believe him? I’m not sure that I do, and Haneke almost certainly doesn’t. Even the photo that appears on the cover of the most recent edition of Many Are Called (see above) betrays the Heisenberg-like effect of Evans’ camera on his subjects. That woman on the left, it seems to me, is — if not wholly aware that she is being photographed — at least suspicious of that man sitting across the aisle from her. Or, perhaps Sontag is right, and Haneke and I are simply enjoying, begrudgingly, the symptoms of our postmodern cynicism. Literate in the debates surrounding image culture, we strike the moral pose, asking tough questions, complicating assumptions, conscious all the while of the vast gulf that separates our bourgeois thumb-twiddling from power.

    In Code Unknown, Haneke harkens toward the prelapsarian image — “the real face” — with the goal, I think, of infecting us with a similar nostalgia. Even the form of the film derives from that goal: each of the vignettes plays like one of Sontag’s “privileged moments . . . a slim object that one can keep and look at again.” Once afflicted by the longing for authority or for the proverbial “genuine article,” anything less — a traditional thriller like Anne’s new film, The Collector, for example — will be exposed as trivial or even morally harmful.

    See also:

  • The Human Stain (2003)

    The Human Stain (2003)

    Dir. by Robert Benton

    I really like this image, which I grabbed from a brief making-of featurette available on the DVD release of The Human Stain. Philip Roth isn’t a participant, really, but he does show up in this one shot — the very last shot of the featurette. He’s turning his head from left to right, I assume because he’s just noticed that he’s being filmed, and there’s a charming look of amusement on his face.

    Philip Roth and Nicole Kidman

    He’s chatting with Nicole Kidman, and Anthony Hopkins is also there in the room. As is Gary Sinise, who’s pretending for the day to be Nathan Zuckerman, a successful Jewish writer now sequestered and hard at work in an isolated cabin somewhere in the wilds of Thoreau and Hawthorne country. Roth, of course, has been pretending to be Zuckerman for nearly thirty years now. Come to think of it, this image could have come directly from the pages of one of his novels — somewhere, maybe, between Deception and The Counterlife: “Philip Roth” meets “Nathan Zuckerman” and all epistemological hell breaks loose.

    The Human Stain is a little more impressive each time I read it. I’m still frustrated by the sadistic delight with which Roth degrades and destroys Delphine Roux, the 100-pound beauty of a French feminist scholar who, as it turns out, really just needs a good fuck from a virile classical humanist like Coleman Silk. And Les Farley, the deranged Vietnam vet, is never developed too far beyond the deranged Vietnam vet “type”; though, to Roth’s credit, Les does come to life — and then some — in one or two of the best scenes Roth has ever written, most notably the conversation between him and Zuckerman that ends the novel. But those are minor complaints, really. Of Roth’s writing of the last twenty-five years, The Human Stain, I think, is second only to American Pastoral in terms of ambition, formal invention, and sheer imaginative force.

    I have no idea if Robert Benton’s adaptation of The Human Stain works on its own as a film. (The Almighty Tomatometer gives it a 41%, so consensus seems to be that it doesn’t quite.) Like the Tolkein-o-philes who continue to parse through every last detail of the Rings trilogy, I read Benton’s film as a vast intertext consisting of Roth’s many novels, his critics, the interviews, the essays, and my own evolving thoughts about — not to mention my imaginings of — The Human Stain itself. What I did last night barely qualifies as “watching a movie.” In the guise of objectivity, though, I’ll say this much: Nicholas Meyer’s screenplay streamlines the various storylines to focus more intently on the relationship between Coleman Silk (Hopkins) and Faunia Farley (Kidman), which seems a perfectly logical choice. He and Benton cut between the postwar promise of 1948 and the politically correct era of fifty years later with a fluidity that gives cohesion to both halves of Silk. And I was especially impressed by Wentworth Miller and Jacinda Barrett, who play the young Silk and his first love, Steena “Voluptas” Paulsson. Their too-brief scenes together restore a sense of balance and scaled-down emotions to a film in more need of both.

    Adaptation is always, in some sense, an act of criticism, I suppose. Meyer and Benton, in close collaboration with their actors and crew, have in essence performed a close reading of Roth’s novel. For example, Meyer has chosen to keep Zuckerman as a narrative device — the author/detective who reconstructs “the whole story” — and Benton foregrounds that device by shooting most of the film from an objective remove. With only a few notable exceptions (Faunia’s discussion with the crow, for instance) the film is almost completely devoid of eyeline matches. When Steena dances for Silk, the camera stays near the back of the room, never allowing us to align too closely our own perception of the film’s world with Silk’s. This is an essential characteristic of Roth’s recent work, nicely transposed to the film.

    But the adaptation of a written text to film also necessarily foregrounds the authority of images, imposing specificity on what an author might have chosen to describe more generally. I was surprised, for example, to find myself suddenly moved by an image of the small boxes in which Faunia stores the ashes of her dead children. In the novel, surprisingly little emphasis is placed on the ashes; Roth does not make of them an excuse for one of his patented ten-page diversions. (I love Roth most of all for his ten-page diversions.) But seeing the boxes in the film — those specific boxes, small, gold, hidden below her bed frame — became an essential moment in the development of Faunia’s character, more essential, I would argue, than Kidman’s overwrought monologue that immediately follows. They are present, like a memento mori, with a force that Roth’s writing never achieves.

    An even more interesting example is Coleman’s last professional fight. Roth’s description:

    Walking down the aisle for the six-rounder, Coleman had had to pass the ringside seat of Solly Tabak, the promoter, who was always dangling a contract in front of Coleman to sign away a third of his earnings for the next ten years. Solly slapped him on the behind and, in his meaty whisper, told him, “Feel the nigger out in the first round, see what he’s got, Silky, and give the people their money’s worth.” Coleman nodded at Tabak and smiled but, while climbing into the ring, thought, Fuck You. I’m getting a hundred dollars, and I’m going to let some guy hit me to give the people their money’s worth? I’m supposed to give a shit about some jerkoff sitting in the fifteenth row? I’m a hundred and thirty-nine pounds and five foot eight and a half, he’s a hundred and forty-five and five foot ten, and I’m supposed to let the guy hit me in the head four, five, ten extra times in order to put on a show? Fuck the show.

    After the fight Solly was not happy with Coleman’s behavior. It struck him as juvenile. “You could have stopped the nigger in the fourth round instead of the first and gave the people their money’s worth. But you didn’t. I ask you nicely, and you don’t do what I ask you. Why’s that, wise guy?”

    “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” (116, 117)

    On the page, that scene is about Coleman’s arrogance, his intellectual superiority. Boxing, he tells his parents earlier, is a matter of outsmarting one’s opponent. The film, however, foregrounds the significance of Roth’s elision: “After the fight . . .” Benton chooses, instead, to shoot the boxing match Rocky-style, and so we are forced to watch the light-skinned Coleman, passing as a Jew, “outsmarting” his black opponent by beating him senseless. Not surprisingly, the rhythm of Wentworth Miller’s performance feels forced and awkward when he delivers the line towards which Roth’s prose so carefully builds: “Because I don’t carry no nigger.” On film, the words have been overpowered and made redundant by the force of the visual image. (I’m embarrassed to admit that, until I saw Silk fight, I’d never seriously considered the importance of Invisible Man — and “The Battle Royal,” specifically — as a precedent for The Human Stain.)

  • Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    This essay was presented at the 2005 conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

    – – –

    When asked recently about the trend toward reality programming on television, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi called it a “good thing,” arguing that, despite the inevitable and corrupting influences of advertising and profit margins, reality TV does satisfy, to a certain extent, the viewing public’s craving for the “genuine article.” “Reality is where it’s at,” Zahedi said. “It’s where people ‘live,’ it’s what’s deep and true.” “Genuine, “reality,” “live,” “deep,” and “true” are, of course, among the most loaded of terms in discussions of documentary filmmaking, a fact not lost on Zahedi, who has spent the majority of his career blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own peculiar brand of autobiographical cinema.

    In his official filmography, Zahedi lists four features and three shorts. A Little Stiff, his 1991 feature debut, co-directed with Greg Watkins, re-enacts his failed attempt to win the affection of a fellow art student. Constructed almost entirely of static master shots, the film is quite different formally from his other work — he has described it as an “aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that [he was] being taught in film school” — but it introduces many of what would become Zahedi’s signatures. He himself stars as “Caveh Zahedi,” a sincere and strangely charismatic filmmaker whose charm (or off-putting eccentricity, depending on one’s general opinion of him) stems from his refusal to mask what he considers his most basic human desires, opinions and, perhaps most notably, his faults behind the guise of socially-constructed, “acceptable” behavior.

    That’s not to say, though, that Zahedi is a hedonist. Far from it, in fact. When exploring the most shameful and transgressive aspects of his nature, as he does, for example, with unflinching candor in his most recent feature, I Am a Sex Addict, there is actually a conspicuous element of moral instruction in his work. Rather, what interests Zahedi is what he consistently refers to as the “ego” — that manifestation of self-image that each of us performs in the day-to-day narrative of our public life. For Zahedi, the problem of the ego touches upon the most fundamental questions of life, art, and (for lack of a better word) God, all of which, in his view, are inextricably intertwined. As man lost faith in the Divine, Zahedi argues, the artist grew in self-importance — no longer a humble servant of Creation but, instead, a new kind of hero: the artist/performer as celebrity. “This problem of the ego in art,” Zahedi writes:

    stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact “channeled,” then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    By virtue of its mechanical ability to capture and re-present photographed reality, or so the argument goes, film has a unique relationship with the ego. On the one hand, a camera establishes a power relationship not unlike Foucault’s panoptic gaze — and, indeed, Zahedi has cited Sartre’s policeman as a metaphor for the situation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there’s the sense that a camera — or an editor’s cut, for that matter — inevitably distorts “reality” by the very act of its observation. Under the scrutiny of a spotlight, the guilt and self-hatred we’ve internalized feel threatened with exposure, and so the ego blossoms, becoming large in order to protect its own integrity. On the other hand, film is also uniquely shaped by randomness, or by what Zahedi describes as “Fate or Reality or God.” It’s that peculiar aspect of the cinema that he calls a “Holy Moment” in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Because God is manifest in all of creation, and because film is able to capture and re-present those manifestations, the cinema, once loosened of ego, can reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

    In each of his films since A Little Stiff, Zahedi has attempted to create a “complex dialectic” between these two qualities of cinema, a dialectic, more or less, between “the will” and “chaos.” In order to do so, he’s employed very particular narrative and formal strategies, the most essential of which is his devotion to autobiography. Zahedi has jokingly referred to his on-screen persona as a “Mascot of Humanity,” as if he were somehow redeeming us all through his willing sacrifice to this artistic project. In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he dispenses with his script entirely, trusting, instead, that God will become revealed in the chaos of filmed life. In both I Was Possessed by God and Tripping with Caveh, Zahedi ingests large doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to completely obliterate, temporarily, his own ego. And in his latest work, I Am a Sex Addict, he has taken an almost-Brechtian turn, carefully balancing the intellectual distance of meta-narrative with the emotional immediacy of “real” human experience.

    Which brings me, finally, to In the Bathtub of the World. Zahedi has written of the film:

    [It] exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to “hear” what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

    To approach In the Bathtub of the World from Zahedi’s perspective, then, would see it as a document of a life — a representative life — freed of the fictions of ego. If we take him at his word, we must assume that the Caveh we “meet” on-screen is the “real” Caveh. When he looks into the camera and makes a frank confession like, “I had a wet dream this morning” or “I have a problem. I don’t know how to live,” we must trust that these statements — in combination with the unspoken language of his facial and body movements and the aesthetic effect of the cinematic reproduction — are as honest an articulation of his immediate experience as he is capable of expressing. “In that particularity” of his own experience, “there is universality,” he has said. “Your life is meaningful and unique. . . . It is the expression of creation happening.” As far as I can tell, it is Zahedi’s deeply sincere belief that the socially-constructed ego-masks we wear degrade human worth and human relationships, and In the Bathtub of the World is his purest and most egalitarian (if such a word is appropriate here) argument for the healing power of honesty.

    Okay, so two important points need to be made here.

    First, we’ve gathered here this morning to participate in a panel called “Reality Effects: Documentary in Film, TV, and Video.” And so I assume that, after watching the first few minutes of the film, and after listening to this overview of Zahedi’s career and guiding principles, at least a few of you are skeptical. If so, you’re certainly not alone. His work is routinely derided as “narcissistic and vain, in the pejorative sense” (to quote a great line from Bathtub). His intrusive use of the camera — for example, turning it on friends, family, and strangers against their expressed wishes — has been condemned as unethical. Popular critics often dismiss his films simply for being banal and boring. (In fact, on their DVD commentary, Zahedi and co-editor Thomas Logoreci recite by memory lines from Bathtub‘s original reviews: “There is no art here” and “The year 2000 couldn’t come soon enough.”) And then, of course, there are the theoretical problems of any post-Enlightenment aesthetic that calls upon transcendence or mystification for its epistemology.

    My second point is something of a confession. Despite my own reservations, I really like most of Zahedi’s films, and Bathtub, in particular. I’ve probably watched it fifteen times now, and I never fail to be moved by Caveh’s humor and sincerity. I suspect this speaks to my own peculiar and evolving ideas about art, democracy, humanism, and (again for lack of a better word) God, but it is also testament, I think, to Zahedi’s skill as a filmmaker. And so, with the remainder of my time, I want to begin to look more closely at the formal strategies he employs here in his effort to dig “deep” into reality.

    The first observation worth noting is that, despite Zahedi’s frequent calls to a kind of divine intervention, there is very little connecting his cinematographic style to that of the filmmakers most often associated with the term “transcendental.” Tarkovsky’s demand that images spring from the memories or “subjective impressions” of the author may have influenced Zahedi’s general approach to filmmaking — he has even cited, as a direct inspiration for Bathtub, Tarkovsky’s discussion of a theoretical film sculpted from the entirety of a single person’s filmed life — but little of the Russian’s uncanny, poetic logic is apparent here. Likewise, Bresson’s formal rigor, Ozu’s meticulous shot breakdowns, and Dreyer’s long tracking shots are all conspicuously absent.

    Bathtub also does not sit comfortably beside the films of other prominent autobiographical filmmakers. Although it raises interesting questions about, say, the nature of addiction and the sacrifices of art-making, Bathtub does not craft a specific argument along the lines of the essay-like films of Ross McElwee or Agnes Varda, for example. If Bathtub can be described as documentary filmmaking, then it’s a strange hybrid of documentary, performance art (here, I’m thinking specifically of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Piece, in which Hsieh photographed himself punching a time card every hour for a year), and also experimental filmmaking. Certain shots in the film are reminiscent, for example, of Jim Jennings’ meditations on the beauty that is to be found in the everyday. I especially like Zahedi’s strangely affecting compositions of stickers affixed to his bathroom tile and the shots of sunlight pouring through his apartment windows.

    Like I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Bathtub is, in its final form, a deceptively conventional narrative. Granted, it originated from an unconventional conceit, but Zahedi has crafted from the raw footage a collection of compelling (if elliptical) stories. Assuming that he did, in fact, shoot at least one minute each day for a year, then his 80-minute film is cut and pasted together from approximately one-fifth of the available footage, allowing ample room to pick and choose which particular stories to develop. Among the narrative strands weaving through Bathtub, we see Zahedi’s battles with sex-, food-, celebrity-, and art addiction; we watch him struggle to survive as a poor independent filmmaker, teaching classes, applying for grants, and acting in others’ films in order to make a living; we experience the very real drama of his family life, particularly when his father suffers a massive heart attack, and Caveh, visibly shaken, fears for the man’s life; we get to share in the mundane details of an average routine — vacuuming, mailing letters, cooking dinner, traveling; and, most essential of all, we watch the evolution of Zahedi’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend (and now wife), Amanda Field. I’m tempted to call Bathtub a docu-romantic-dramedy (or something like that).

    Zahedi’s editing strategy is apparent from the opening moments of the film. The first shot is a medium-close-up of his almost-motionless face, a quiet, static image followed immediately by the more lively and kinetic scenes in which Amanda cuts his hair and Caveh discovers the contours of his own skull. His entry for January 4 th is an efficient narrative in miniature. He begins by echoing the opening shot in another direct confession to the camera (a recurring motif throughout the film), then cuts relatively-quickly to close-ups of a Frank Black CD and the front of a CD player, before pushing back to a medium-long shot of Caveh dancing. Another close-up, this time of a tape recorder, then a jump-cut confessional shot. January 6 th opens with a nicely-composed, still-life image of sunlight hitting shelves of books and fruit, followed by a shot of his kitchen window and the green wall on the other side.

    I mention the specific shot-pattern because, in the course of writing this paper, I’ve realized that there are two main reasons I find Bathtub so improbably watchable. The first is the complex rhythms of the piece — what Leo Charney calls the “peaks and valleys” of narrative. Even in that opening sequence I’ve just described, a sequence that lasts barely three-and-a-half minutes, Zahedi varies, quite deliberately, the shape and color of felt time. Juxtaposed against the quick pace of the earlier sequence’s efficient story-telling, those static images of light and shadow are made all the more strange and new. Likewise, the shot of Caveh’s body in motion, dancing ecstatically to a Frank Black song, is especially surprising after we’ve witnessed his first two, staid confessionals. Zahedi’s greatest talent, in fact, might be as an editor. I Am a Sex Addict is an even more impressive exercise in precise modulations of tone.

    Finally, though, I must concede that the greatest source of pleasure in this film is, for me, Caveh himself. In the Bathtub of the World seems to prove that a compelling narrative can be shaped from the “real” moments of “real” life, which shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, I suppose, to anyone who has read a decent autobiography or memoir. But what of the ego? And what of its relationship to cinema? Zahedi has said that a camera has the unique ability to capture “truth”: “You want to be accepted for the true self, not the false front. . . . . Love me despite all this.” Ultimately, despite my intellectual resistance as a critic, I find myself of the same mind as one of Zahedi’s film students, who, given a moment alone with his camera, looks it in the eye and says, “Caveh, I was touched by your sincerity.”

  • Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession (2004)

    Dir. by Xan Cassavetes

    Xan Cassavetes’s Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession tells the parallel, rise-and-fall stories of a Los Angeles pay-TV channel and Jerry Harvey, the man who acted as its chief programmer and svengali. Harvey, as the film informs us in the opening minutes, murdered his second wife in 1988 before turning the gun on himself, and the “tragedy” of his end is ostensibly at the heart of Cassavetes’s documentary. I say “ostensibly” and put scare quotes around “tragedy,” though, because in Z Channel the only real tragedy is the loss to film buffs of Harvey’s single-minded cinephilia. We’re reminded of this loss again and again, as talking head after talking head (Altman, Tarrantino, Payne, Jarmusch, Verhoeven, etc.) wax nostalgic for the days when any Los Angelino could turn on Z Channel and see Berlin Alexanderplatz, The 400 Blows, an Italian skin flick, or the premiere of Peckinpah’s cut of The Wild Bunch. Cassavetes includes a bounty of clips from Harvey’s favorite films and supplements her story with interviews of his co-workers and friends.

    I love many of the same films that Harvey loved. And I would pay quite a lot to have a station like Z Channel beamed into my home. Watching Cassavetes’s film, I was once again reminded — as I assume was Cassavetes’s intention — of how pedestrian and market-driven so much of current film programming is, both theatrically and on cable. But, so what? I knew that before the film began. When asked whether writing political theater is just “preaching to the choir,” Tony Kushner once responded:

    A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this “preaching to the converted” question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

    Z Channel is a crummy film. It’s poorly constructed from short segments that offer superficial observations about specific films (“the director’s cut is obviously better”), the film industry (“without studio support and marketing, a film doesn’t stand a chance”), and Harvey himself (“he was seeing a psychiatrist several afternoons a week”). As an aside, I was also annoyed by Cassavetes’s systematic use of only the most provocative film clips — for example, the hot tub scene from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the pagans in Andrei Rublev. Instead of rattling her audience’s smugness, Cassavetes relies upon it, offering up a paean to cinephilia that is audacious enough to equate metaphorically the death of a TV station (and the eclectic programming it represented) with a murder/suicide.

    Z Channel comes to life for only one brief moment during the very end. After describing the last few days of Harvey’s life, Cassavetes includes a brief snippet from one of his former friends and colleagues. Barely containing his emotion, he says something to the effect of, “There’s a danger of turning Jerry into a hero here, and I’ve got a real problem with that.” I sat upright in my chair. It was the sentiment I’d been waiting for more than an hour to hear expressed. Lest we take this warning too seriously, though, Cassavetes then cuts to Robert Altman, who, when asked the same question about Harvey, pronounces with little hesitation, “I like him.”

    I did a quick scan of other online reviews of Z Channel and was disappointed to find so many critics accepting this redemptive narrative of the inspiring soul who was taken from us, tragically, and whose work for the integrity of cinema we should take up in his stead. Such a reading is possible only because of Cassavetes’s decision to elide the violence of Harvey’s end. How would the tone of the film change, for example, had she included reports from the crime scene or interviews with his wife’s surviving family? Instead, we are offered only one quick glance at a photo of the woman who later would be brutally murdered, and a few fond remembrances of her from Harvey’s friends.

  • Slacker (1991)

    Slacker (1991)

    Dir. by Richard Linklater

    Fifteen minutes or so into Slacker, a college-aged guy (Tom Pallotta) steps out of a coffee shop and is greeted by Jerry Deloney, a fast-talking, 40-something conspiracy theorist in a Batman T-shirt. Tom is headed home, and Jerry invites himself along for the walk, unloading a stream of paranoid fantasies as they go. Anti-gravity technologies, Mars landings, “secret groups in charge of the government,” drug cartels, missing scientists—Jerry’s ideas sound deluded and absurd even when they creep into the realm of verifiable fact. (Fifteen years later, his warnings about greenhouse effects seem eerily prescient.)

    On his commentary track on the Criterion DVD release of Slacker, writer/director Richard Linklater recalls his one direction to Tom:

    “It’s very important how you react. This is the tone of the movie.” I didn’t want any judgment. I said, “Don’t look at him weird. Don’t judge him. That’s up to the audience to do.”

    That refusal to judge, I’m finally realizing, is what attracts me again and again to Linklater’s films. Even in a genre picture like Dazed and Confused he avoids the typical teen movie cliches by affording equal value to all of his characters, regardless of their clique or social standing. That some of the characters come off looking worse than others (Ben Affleck’s O’Bannion and Parker Posey’s Darla, for example) is more the product of their particular behavior—a kind of socially-sanctioned sadism not uncommon among teens (and adults, for that matter)—than any too-simple, prescribed plot device.

    Linklater, perhaps more than any other contemporary filmmaker, is alive to the potential and the basic human value of the men and women who walk in and out of his films. And he seems to have a particular fondness for the folks who live on the margins, whether by choice or necessity. Slacker takes on one particular marginalized community—that class of restless, searching, “underemployed” artists, musicians, and drop-outs who seem to congregate in the corners of all American college towns—but his attitude toward them is not markedly different from his treatment of those teenagers in Dazed, the lovers in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, or the philosophers, scientists, and poets who drift through Waking Life: all are people of ideas with active imaginations and complex human desires. That we instantly fall into the habit of judging them is a bad thing, Linklater reminds us again and again.

    The young men and women of Slacker often talk nonsense. Their ideas are seldom fully-formed, and the most articulate of the lot are occasionally guilty of parroting whatever book they’ve read most recently. There’s the “Dostoyevsky Wannabe” who grabs a pencil to transcribe his own pretentious ideas at the moment of inspiration, and the “jilted boyfriend” who reads from Ulysses as he tosses his friend’s typewriter from a bridge. The film is smart enough and self-aware enough to acknowledge that simply parroting others’ ideas isn’t enough. As in Waking Life, there’s an existential bent to much of the film, a constant debate between theory and action. “You just pull in these things from the shit you read, and you haven’t thought it out for yourself, no bearing on the world around us, and totally unoriginal,” one girl tells her boyfriend. “It’s like you just pasted together these bits and pieces from your ‘authoritative sources.’ I don’t know. I’m beginning to suspect there’s nothing really in there.” And by that point in the film, we’re already feeling a bit bored and a bit superior, and so we nod our heads in agreement.

    But, while it’s not enough, reading and debating, becoming engaged with the world of ideas, is something of value, even when in its earliest stages of development and even though it can’t be easily commodified by a consumerist culture. Linklater refers to several of his characters as “uncredentialed authorities”—people like the JFK assassination buff, the old anarchist, and the video backpacker. They are experts in their various fields, knowledgeable and articulate, and yet they remain marginalized just the same. With a Ph.D. after their names or a five-figure price tag beside their art installations—with a credential—their place in society would be more secure, their market value more easily quantifiable. But, instead, they’re “slackers,” a term that has become derogatory in the years since the film’s release.

    There’s something wonderfully subversive about Slacker. I think so, at least. Linklater gives us a world functioning within a different economy. People live communally in shared houses, taking with them little more than a pile of clothes and books. They repair their own cars using borrowed tools and junked parts. One stamp and a few licks gets several people into a bar for free. “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work at it,” one guy says. Of course, as anyone who has ever toyed with radical ideas knows, even alternative economies are slaves to “the real thing,” and so viewers of Slacker are forced to balance whatever romantic idealism they find in the film with the practical questions of life in capitalist America. I enjoy wobbly discussions of the Smurfs as much as the next guy, but somebody’s got to buy the next round of beers, know what I’m saying?

    Is there a single issue more important in America today and more absent from our movie screens than class? We occasionally get one of those fairy tales about some guy (usually white) who has it all but who doesn’t learn to live until he is befriended by some world-weary and wise person (usually black) from the wrong side of the tracks. Or we get satires of the suburbs that ask us to “look closer.” But we seldom see films that fundamentally challenge the system itself. I love that Slacker, like a good documentary, explores this other world, this other economy, while allowing us relative freedom to judge its merits.

    In one of Slacker‘s final sequences, an old man walks alone, speaking into a tape recorder.

    My life, my loves, where are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent.

    It’s as close to a defining moment for Slacker as you’re likely to find. The first time I watched the film, I fixated on that last sentence, reading it as a challenge to anyone who would dismiss Linklater’s experiments in form. “Coherence is a lie of narrative cinema,” he seemed to be saying. (And I still believe that, by the way.) But now I can’t seem to get past the old man’s comments about the “necessary beauty” of the struggles of life. Or perhaps that should be the struggles with life. Active rather than passive.

  • Chocolat (1988)

    Chocolat (1988)

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    Claire Denis’s debut film, Chocolat, opens with a two-minute static shot of a man and child, both black, playing in shallow ocean waters. When the camera does finally move, it pans nearly 180 degrees to the right before coming to rest on a young white woman. I thought little of the shot the first time I saw the film, but watching Chocolat again last night, I was struck by the economy of that single, simple camera movement. By dividing the frame in perfect halves, the shot’s composition introduces what will become one of the film’s central metaphors, the horizon line; by recontextualizing an idyllic image of a father and son (presumably) through what amounts to a cutless eyeline match, the pan firmly establishes the film’s tricky but essential subjective perspective.

    The young woman, we eventually learn, is traveling through Cameroon, visiting the lands where she was raised as the daughter of a French colonial district officer. France (Mireille Perrier) carries with her her father’s leatherbound diary of notes and sketches, and she fingers its pages as if the diary were family album, romance novel, and roadmap, all in one. Ten minutes into Chocolat, we leave the present to enter her reverie of the past, and all but the final few minutes of the film are a recreation of her childhood landscape. Specifically, France remembers a time when her father set out on a short trip, leaving her and her mother (Giulia Boschi) behind under the care of their houseboy, Protée (Isaach De Bankolé). Like an Edith Wharton novel, Chocolat appropriates the conventions of a romance plot to comment on restrictive social structures, specifically the complexities of a colonial system that simultaneously dehumanizes and hypersexualizes the colonized, while also degrading the colonizer. It’s brilliantly executed—a story told completely in small but significant gestures.

    Reviewers who have deemed “unnecessary” the framing device involving the adult France have completely misread Chocolat, I think. While there is much to recommend in the film—Agnes Godard’s cinematography, the many fine performances, and Denis’s typically seductive pacing, to name just a few—Denis’s handling of the film’s subjective perspective is what differentiates this film from other earnest and well-intentioned examinations of racism and/or colonialism. (There is probably room here for a discussion of the differences between Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, and Anthony Minghella’s also-good but differently-focused film adaptation, but I’ll save that for another day.)

    Take, for example, the most significant of Chocolat‘s many small gestures: the moment when the mother reaches slowly from her position on the floor to touch Protée’s calf. It’s a perfectly staged sequence, more charged and transgressive than anything imagined in a typical Hollywood sex scene. And Protée’s reaction retains its mystery and shock even on a second viewing. But who is “remembering” this moment? Although Denis’s camera shoots from the vantage point of the young France, three feet or so from the floor, France is not in the room. She could not have witnessed this event, and so we are left to answer any number of questions: Who is telling this story? From what evidence is she reconstructing her narrative? How does something so subjective as memory (not to mention love, faith, and power) distort our understanding of history, both personal and political.

    Near the end of Chocolat, France is told by her father, “The closer you get to [the horizon], the farther it moves. You see the line, but it doesn’t exist.” It’s one of those movie lines that screams significance. But recognizing the metaphor as metaphor and unpacking it are very different tasks, and I’m finding the latter a pleasant and surprising challenge. The most banal reading might be something like, “the line that separates the races is culturally-determined and, therefore, surmountable.” There’s nothing in the film to suggest such a rose-colored reading, however, and, really, the film would be dishonest crap if there were. Or, the father’s line might be exploded into some universal platitude about the hopeless quest for understanding. “No matter how hard we search, Truth always remains just out of reach.” But Chocolat is too grounded in specific historical conditions to be reduced to a platitude.

    The horizon metaphor begins to find its shape, I think, in juxtaposition with another scene: the moment when the mother reprimands her cook, who speaks in badly broken English. “Enoch, I don’t understand any of what you’re saying,” she tells him. (I can’t comment on the original release of the film, but the DVD wisely leaves the African languages untranslated.) I have always wished that someone would film Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, but Chocolat has made any effort to do so redundant, for at their core both are about the colonizer’s desire to understand the colonized, a desire that is human and noble, on one hand, but too disfigured by power and history to be anything more than patronizing. This is how Gordimer describes the terrifying moment when her heroine, Maureen Smales, recognizes that she is caught in such a trap with her servant, July:

    How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
    Fifteen Years
    your boy
    you satisfy

    But—and this is important—unlike the end of July’s People, which is a story of revolution, Chocolat does offer some portent of hope. The film ends, once again, in the present day. France has hitched a ride from the black man whom she first spotted swimming in the ocean, and whom she soon discovers is actually an American immigrant. This revelation once again recontextualizes Chocolat‘s opening image, calling into question the validity of France’s perspective. (Had she imagined herself witnessing some timeless ritual of real black African life? Did this fantasy put her in closer communion with her mother? With an imagined version of her mother?) Denis, who also spent much of her childhood in colonial Africa, clearly sympathizes with France’s plight. Her desire to understand, to write narratives that discover the human in inhumane circumstances, is noble, is essential, even if fraught with ambiguities and unavoidable landmines.

    The final image in Chocolat is another long static shot, the frame divided in half once again by the horizon. Three black men smoke and laugh as an unexpected burst of rain passes through. France is gone, but somehow we have retained her (its) perspective. Denis leaves the camera running for several minutes, inviting us to understand these men, or, at least, fostering in us the desire to do so.

  • Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    Fallen Creatures in a Fallen World: The Films of John Cassavetes

    This essay was originally published at Sojourners.

    – – –

    Superficiality is the curse of our age.” So begins Celebration of Discipline, Richard J. Foster’s classic defense of traditional spiritual practices such as meditation, fasting, study, simplicity, and solitude. Published in 1978, Foster’s book offered a corrective to America’s increasingly alienating and shortsighted cultural values – values that had inevitably infected the life of the church as well. Three decades later, Foster’s critique of the “doctrine of instant satisfaction” is more vital than ever, for technology now mediates all aspects of our lives, putting gigabytes of information in our hands (or handheld devices) but offering us little incentive to process it meaningfully. As a result, we are a people driven to distraction by trivia – by facts and figures, sound-bites, and rhetoric divorced from meaning or human consequence.

    The traditional Hollywood cinema is a direct contributor to this superficiality. Most films playing at your local multiplex – like most television shows, political speeches, and pharmaceutical advertisements – actively reinforce the comforting notion that all determining forces, whether social, political, economic, or biological, can be overcome through some combination of will, effort, and, if need be, superhuman or transcendent goodness. The assumption is that a narrative can and will be written that will discover a perfect order amid the filmed world’s chaos. Think of the standard comic book blockbuster, murder mystery, courtroom drama, or police procedural. The clues will all add up in the end. The dissonances will all be resolved. And in two hours or less.

    John Cassavetes, best remembered for his starring performances in such films as The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, countered Hollywood’s lazier, dehumanizing tendencies in a series of landmark films made between 1959 and 1984. Serving variously as writer, director, actor, financier, and all-around master of ceremonies, Cassavetes crafted a handful of films that, collectively, give lie to Hollywood’s faith in melodramatic plotting. Instead of stock character types, his films are populated by people who exist in constant flux, defining and redefining their social roles in relation to ever-changing circumstances. Rather than plotting a traditional narrative arc, Cassavetes’ films resist resolution (and often exposition, climaxes, and denouement as well), offering us poignant glimpses of recognizable lives, messy details and all.

    The Criterion Collection’s recent release of a Cassavetes DVD box set offers the perfect opportunity to discover five of his most important films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977). The collection also features an impressive, if regrettably uncritical, assortment of DVD extras, including a new documentary, interviews, and archival materials that provide further insight into Cassavetes’ working methods and his defining preoccupations.

    CASSAVETES WAS BORN in New York City in 1929, the son of Greek immigrants. After graduating from the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts and finding moderate success on stage, on television, and in the movies, he opened a method-acting workshop in Manhattan that attracted a core group of young talent. Recognizing the dramatic potential in his students’ improvisations and eager to explore alternative approaches to filmmaking, Cassavetes scavenged $20,000 and over a two-year period developed Shadows, a jazz-scored, Beat-infused document of disillusioned youth and race relations. In doing so, Cassavetes essentially gave birth to America’s independent cinema.

    Shot with a handheld 16mm camera, Shadows feels at times like a documentary, and indeed Cassavetes’ early methods owe more to the work of documentarian Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North) and to the Italian Neorealists (Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti) than to the classic Hollywood studio system. Shadows achieves additional verisimilitude by means of its improvisatory nature. Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney offers a useful distinction between our typical understanding of “improvisation” – that is, an actor spontaneously inventing dialogue – and Cassavetes’ approach, which, though meticulously scripted, captures the performative nature of our daily lives, those moments when we improvise conversations, struggling to find the right words and too often stumbling upon the wrong ones instead. His characters, Carney writes, “are not denied moments of zaniness, inconsistency, or improvisatory inspiration because these would violate some tidy, coherent, package of ‘character’ – an entity, it is easy to forget, that exists only in certain forms of art and almost never in life.”

    This preoccupation with capturing the complex rhythms of “real life” extends to the structure of Cassavetes’ films as well. The average movie is composed of 50 or more brief sequences, each typically lasting less than five minutes, and each is designed with a particular end in mind – say, to move the plot from point G to point H or to develop a significant aspect of a character or relationship. Faces and A Woman Under the Influence, both starring Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, throw off this traditional plotting and are instead built from a relatively small number of extended scenes. The result can be disorienting for the first-time viewer. Without the familiar tropes of melodrama (good vs. evil, love triangles, comedic relief, etc.), viewers are freed to explore the film without bias. As Carney writes, “every moment becomes as potentially important, interesting, and worthy of our attention as every other.” The multiplex is where we go to “lose ourselves” for a few hours at a time. Films like A Woman Under the Influence deliberately frustrate this tendency at every turn, forcing us to participate actively in the lives depicted onscreen.

    The films of John Cassavetes will never be accused of being “mindless entertainment.” His characters are, like the rest of us, fallen creatures in a fallen world who suffer the consequences of their behavior, deserved and undeserved, but who hold out hope despite it all, egged on by occasional encounters with love and something like grace. That makes them rare finds among American movies: characters deserving of our time, our patience, our empathy. “I am a moralist,” Cassavetes once said, “in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and to not be in judgment.” He extends that freedom to his audience as well. It is a powerful corrective to Hollywood’s superficiality.

  • The Skywalk is Gone (2002)

    The Skywalk is Gone (2002)

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

    When I wrote an overview of Tsai’s career two years ago, I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to see The Skywalk is Gone. So I cheated. I stole a great line from Chuck Stephens’s review and turned it into my conclusion. Here’s what I wrote then:

    If Tsai’s most recent work is any indication, it is safe to assume that he will continue to poke and prod into the bodies and souls of his loyal collaborators for some time. Along with his choreographic adaptation of a play by Brecht, The Good Woman of Sezuan (1998), and a short film about religious ritual, A Conversation with God (2001), Tsai has also written and directed a 25-minute film, The Skywalk Is Gone (2002), that picks up where What Time Is It There? left off. The short film’s title refers to the actual location, now demolished, where Hsiao-kang and Shiang-chyi first meet. Noting that the short concludes with a long shot of bright blue skies, Chuck Stephens writes that the skywalk is “gone but not forgotten, even if, in its absence, heaven seems a little bit easier to see.” (11) Those blue skies—along with the rumors that Tsai will continue this story in his next feature—suggest that grace, once only a whisper in Tsai’s world, might yet take shape and become as excruciatingly real as the pain it is meant to relieve.

    That last line is a bit too precious, and “grace,” in particular, seems too lazy a word to describe the workings of Tsai’s world, but those blue skies do have a peculiarly joyful effect. That there are blue skies at all in Tsai’s Taiwan is, of course, a major development. Skywalk pokes fun at Tsai’s trademark mise-en-scene (water-logged streets and apartments) by replacing it with a draught, and the director gets some nice gags out of the premise: Hsiao-kang trying to wash his hands, Shiang-chyi trying to order a cup of coffee.

    Such change, it seems to me, is the central concern of Skywalk. In the film’s opening image, Shiang-chyi stares up at the spot where the overpass once hung; Tsai floods the soundtrack with the drone of jumbotron advertising and passing crowds. The tilt of her head says it all. “Progress” is a mixed bag, improving our lives at times but also destroying old bonds and reshaping our memories in the process. Those of us who have seen What Time Is It There? know this location, but it’s suddenly unrecognizable, and like Shiang-chyi, we are forced to recontextualize the scene. Doing so demands some work of the viewer, and Tsai allows us plenty of time to do it, leaving his camera fixed for several minutes at a time.

    The Skywalk is Gone is like a little gift to all of us who have followed Tsai’s career, and I’m thrilled that Wellspring included it on the DVD release of Goodbye, Dragon Inn. (Unfortunately, Wellspring has unloaded on us a couple more horrible transfers.) I especially enjoyed the escalator scene, which alludes directly to The River, and, by doing so, sets up our expectations for an encounter that isn’t resolved until later in the film. Great stuff. More on Goodbye, Dragon Inn in the coming days.

  • Tarnation (2004)

    Tarnation (2004)

    Dir. by Jonathan Caouette

    The theater where I saw Tarnation subjects early arrivals to “The Twenty,” an obnoxious barrage of advertisements that I tolerate for two reasons: first, because it helps to subsidize Knoxville’s only venue for foreign and independent cinema (and given the small crowds that typically greet me there, it would appear that those subsidies are essential); and, second, because I relish the moment immediately following “The Twenty.” The digital projector is quieted, the house lights dim, and the film projector comes to life. In those few seconds of silence before the first trailer begins, you can hear actual film spooling through a gate—a mechanical process with gears and a bulb and celluloid.

    I mention all that because when the projector kicked into motion yesterday, I wondered how much longer the sound would last. Jonathan Caouette, as we all know by now, constructed Tarnation on his Mac for a couple hundred bucks. It’s composed largely of still photos and home videos. Little film was exposed in the making of his movie, and the quality of its presentation would have suffered little had it been projected digitally. As most films will be. Soon enough. That’s what was I thinking, at least, as trailers for Kinsey and The Sea Inside streamed by. Two biopics of extraordinary men who led extraordinary lives. Two films I haven’t the slightest interest in seeing. I’m just not interested in extraordinary lives, apparently. Give me the ordinary. The mundane. But present them to me with a touch a grace, and do it honestly and artfully. That’s what I was thinking, at least, when the ads finally ended and Tarnation finally began—in darkness and to the diegetic rumblings of Caouette’s camera.

    A quick synopsis. When she was twelve years old, Renee LeBlanc, a strikingly beautiful child, fell from the roof of her home and suffered temporary paralysis. Her parents, convinced that Renee’s troubles were psychological, approved aggressive treatment, and over the next two years she was subjected to more than two hundred rounds of shock therapy. Whether her mental illness existed prior to the treatments or was, in fact, a result of them Tarnation does not make clear (and cannot make clear, given the vagaries of memory and denial). Caouette, Renee’s only child, suspects the latter, however, and his film is a blinding, visceral document of the anger, sorrow, desire, and hope (despite it all) that have forever colored his perceptions of art, family, and love.

    Drawn from nearly 160 hours of home movies, tape recordings, and clips from Caouette’s amateur narrative films, and complimented by odes to pop culture and by an aggressive soundtrack, Tarnation has been described by its executive producers Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell as a “movie of the home” and an “autobiographical documentary.” In the case of Tarnation, classification is no exercise in pedantry, for evaluating its success or its artfulness (for lack of better words) demands discussion of its aims and methods. The film is compelling, to be sure—always interesting and, at times, deeply moving. Only the most jaded could emerge from the experience of Tarnation without respect for its subjects, a mother and son who have somehow managed to emerge from the circumstances of their lives with a hard-fought love for one another and for the sacred moments of beauty in life. It’s worth seeing for that reason alone.

    But, finally, I think, the film’s formal problems—its haphazard construction, conflicted voice, and questionable representations of life—become too great to sustain the weight of Caouette’s noble ambitions. (Because this is a blog and not a formal essay, and because I really should be working on other projects, I’m going to make it easier for myself by tackling each of these critiques in turn. The best compliment I can give Tarnation is to say that it’s the first film I’ve seen in weeks that compelled me to write.)

    Construction. The first of my complaints with Tarnation is also perhaps the most petty, and it’s simply this: After the opening titles, I don’t recall a single moment of silence. The film moves from one montage to the next, each accompanied by music culled from Caouette’s personal collection of CDs and LPs. Occasionally the songs are manipulated for effect—tailored to enhance the images on screen—but much more frequently, the picture is cut to sound. Caouette’s much-discussed exploitation of iMovie’s editing features explodes his home movies into stunningly beautiful abstraction, but they find their rhythms too easily in the music. This, it seems to me, creates an aesthetic dissonance. I could too clearly imagine the filmmaker, exhausted by the endless decisions of editing, pulling an album from his shelf and allowing the song to determine the cuts. “Rhymed abstraction” (or some such makeshift term) might be employed to justify the technique. Perhaps it’s a fitting description of schizophrenia. I don’t know. I just felt that the form too often co-opted the content, which is most regrettable because when Tarnation does find its voice, it’s stunning. Which leads me to . . .

    Voice. Following a trip to visit his mother, the teenaged Jonathan smoked two joints that he later learned had been laced with PCP and dipped in formaldehyde. The resulting psychotic episode left him with depersonalization disorder, “a feeling of disconnection from the body and a constant sense of unreality.” Caouette writes:

    They don’t really have a cure for this disorder, so it’s something I have learned to live with. Tarnation is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can also feel like they’re in a living dream, which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious. Tarnation is a documentary in the sense that it’s a true story but it’s also a happening, an encounter, and a way for you to meet me and for me to meet you.

    Caouette mimics his thought processes through formal means, beginning with the narration, which is textual, rather than the expected voice-over, and which refers in the third person to the Jonathan we meet on screen. This is a Jonathan Caouette, the film implies, one of many that we will eventually meet. There is the young Jonathan with his first camera, acting the role of an abused woman “givin’ testimony” to her sins. There is the teenaged Jonathan, openly gay and directing his musical adaptation of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (brilliant!). There is the 20-something Jonathan, living (happily?) and acting in New York City. We are asked, in a sense, to read each of these personae as characters in a film about a boy’s search for the love of his mother. It’s all happening to them, the film implies, to those people.

    But the step into third person is a conceit, and, in my opinion, it’s an unnecessary and misguided one. In the final act of Tarnation, when Caouette is living in a long-term relationship and is choosing to take on the responsibility of caring for his mother, we meet the Jonathan whose voice has been, by turns, whispering, screaming, and crying in our ears. Caouette’s effort to dramatize the “disconnection from his body” is a posture: Tarnation is no less self-aware than one of Caveh Zahedi’s autobiographical films and it lacks Zahedi’s formal rigor. I like the idea of a film such as this deliberately fracturing the narrative voice, but the execution in this case is poor. A symptom of Caouette’s relative inexperience, I would guess. Which leads me to . . .

    Representing a Life. Look closely at the image I’ve posted above. Mother and son. Finally at rest. Finally at peace. It’s one of Tarnation‘s closing images and also one of its most poignant. A glimmer of hope. Love among the ruins. But here’s the thing: the scene is staged. Renee is, as far as we know, really asleep, but Jonathan is not. He and David (Jonathan’s boyfriend) found her there on the couch and apparently couldn’t resist the precious, pieta-like beauty of the moment. The film begins with a similar trick: the camera is fixed on television static when David returns home to their apartment and wakes Caouette from a nightmare. He’s been dreaming about Renee, we are told. He’s worried. Cut to the next morning. Jonathan and David wake to the sound of an alarm clock. Try to ignore the tripod. Try to ignore the fact that you’re now suddenly watching a narrative film.

    I was anticipating Tarnation with some excitement because I had assumed that, unlike the larger-budget biopics filling the multiplexes right now, it would, without compromise, elevate truth above affect. But it does feel compromised. Caouette betrays the integrity of his film by focusing again and again on images that seem to float outside of the film as aesthetic objects. Like his mother, Caouette is a striking beauty (as is David, actually), and portions of the film play like a love song to their remarkable faces. (Notice the slow zoom-ins on Jonathan’s and David’s dark eyes.) Perhaps it’s another symptom of depersonalization disorder to reduce people to two-dimensional characters, but, regardless, it doesn’t make for great filmmaking. Ultimately, Tarnation is a compelling film about extraordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and that, regrettably, is its greatest asset.

  • Friday Night (2002)

    Friday Night (2002)

    Dir. by Claire Denis

    Joanna tells me — and she’s told me this many times over the years — that she fell in love the first time we held hands. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. Men, in my experience at least, seldom consider hands. Or, we consider them only when they’re noticeable — scarred, chewed, ornamented by loudly painted nails. Even then, though, we offer only a passing glance and a quick, rarely-conscious judgment. To really consider a hand demands a certain intimacy, I think. We’re allowed to stare at faces, encouraged even to maintain eye contact during public conversations, but to really look at a hand (or the place where a neck meets a shoulder or the back of a knee) is taboo outside of a bedroom (metaphorically speaking).

    In After Life, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s brilliant 1998 film about a heaven in which the new-dead film the happiest moment of their lives that they might relive it eternally, one woman restages her first taste of love — a perfectly innocent encounter on a public bench — and when we finally see the finished film, it culminates in a slow zoom onto her lover’s hands. That sequence, like nearly every frame of Claire Denis’s Friday Night, reminded me of Joanna’s words and sent me off wondering about “the female gaze.” (The quotation marks allow me to allude casually to feminist film theory, though I’m not sure yet if that is what I’m really after here.)

    Denis seems to have discovered a cinematographic grammar entirely of her own. I say that having seen only three of her films — Beau Trevail, which I love in part because I never would have imagined such an adaptation of Billy Budd possible; L’Intrus, which is the most beautifully frustrating film I’ve seen this year; and now Friday Night, a film about a woman (Valérie Lemercier) who has an affair the night before she is to move in with her boyfriend. I would like to read a formal analysis of one of Denis’s films because I simply don’t understand how they work. She and cinematographer Agnès Godard are able, somehow, to create a world that is both recognizably real and mythic; the camera remains objective (showing us things that no character could have seen), but it also becomes so intimately involved with the action that the entire film is covered by a sheen of subjective emotion. Magic is possible.

    When we were discussing L’Intrus, Girish kept reminding me that the line separating narrative- from experimental filmmaking has been arbitrarily drawn and that Denis’s films prove the point. While more neatly-plotted than her latest feature, Friday Night also slips easily across those borders. The lovemaking scenes, for example, are constructed from a collage of extreme close-ups that slip in and out of focus to the point of abstraction. Sex, which is so often reduced by most films to little more than genital stimulation, becomes alien. And familiar. A patchwork of fingers and necks and ankles. And hands. If I were asked to summarize Friday Night, I would say it is a film about hands and about the impossible fact that my wife decided to love me the moment she first held mine.

  • 9 Songs (2004)

    9 Songs (2004)

    Dir. by Michael Winterbottom

    “It’s claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place, like two people in a bed.” Matt (Kieran O’Brien) delivers this line in voice-over after the fact — after his ex-girlfriend Lisa (Margot Stilley) has returned home to America and after he has returned to Antarctica, where he is researching glaciers. The threatening isolation of Antarctica, like Matt’s simile, feels forced in 9 Songs, a small film about intimacy, in its various shapes and guises. Winterbottom’s framing metaphor, complete with flyover shots of stark, white landscapes, is too heavy and the only false note in what is otherwise a fascinating and successful, I think, cinematic experiment.

    Intercutting scenes of the couple’s private moments (revealed in graphic detail) with their trips to live concerts, 9 Songs explores that juxtaposition and discovers in it something of the human struggle to balance one’s needs for protection and individuality, on the one hand, and self-surrender and love, on the other. Anyone who has ever closed her eyes and moved in perfect unison with those around her at a packed music venue will recognize in 9 Songs the almost tribal spirit of its live concert footage. Brought together with shared interests and with a desire for shared transcendence (or whatever you want to call it), concert-goers are often offered a glimpse, however brief, of ideal community. We lose ourselves to the music, lose ourselves to the rhythms of the crowd — a respite from the monotony and narcissism of our private preoccupations. And, best of all, with no long-term commitment required.

    Likewise, anyone who has ever stared across the table at a lover, aware of unacknowledged tensions but unwilling or unable to address them, will recognize 9 Songs‘ portrait of a failing relationship: infatuation, disillusionment, and escape. Like a contemporary Breathless — and O’Brien’s resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo makes such a comparison impossible to ignore — 9 Songs describes a relationship by exposing its most casual, least self-conscious moments. (I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s desire for Eyes Wide Shut to be about “the naked woman at the refrigerator door as she remembers to put the chicken away before she goes to bed.”) My favorite moments in 9 Songs take place just before and after sex, when Matt and Lisa are at their most unguarded — laughing at a bathroom mirror, relaxing in the tub, fixing breakfast. I can’t think of another film that gets those moments just right.

    Which leads me to believe that 9 Songs succeeds where so many other films have failed, in part, because of its graphic sex scenes. Unlike, say, Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus, which features a brief penetration shot to emphasize the base desires that drive so much of human behavior, 9 Songs includes several extended sequences that reveal the complexities of any sexual relationship: the pleasures and insecurities, the playfulness, the self-gratification (at times) and the selflessness (at others), the awkwardness and the beauty and the joy — or, in a word, the intimacy. Friends and I who saw 9 Songs all agreed that, at only 65 minutes, we would have liked for it to be even longer, especially if we could spend more time with Matt and Lisa behind closed doors. Recommended (with obvious warnings, of course).

    Your reward for reading the entire response: “Suddenly” by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, one of the bands featured in 9 Songs.

  • Little Sky (2004)

    Little Sky (2004)

    Dir. by María Victoria Menis

    Félix (Leonardo Ramírez) is a young drifter who, in the opening act of Little Sky, jumps from a train, stumbles into conversation at a local bar, and finds himself working for room and board at a small farm. Its owners, Roberto (Dario Levy) and Mercedes (Mónica Lairana), seem content on first glance, but Félix soon discovers that Roberto’s drunken violence is the source of Mercedes’s quiet reserve and depression. When Mercedes finally leaves her husband, Félix takes her infant son Chango, with whom he has developed a close bond, and flees for the economic promise of Bueno Aires.

    Like a Frank Norris or Theodore Dreiser novel, Little Sky drives steadily toward its inevitable, and inevitably dark, conclusion. Despite his genuinely good intentions, Félix’s dreams of providing the stable family for Chango that he, also an orphan, lacked are romantic lies, and we in the audience can see it coming for miles. But Menis’s direction makes it a fairly compelling story, nonetheless. I quite liked the first half of the film and particularly enjoyed her handling of Félix’s and Mercedes’s relationship, which manages to avoid the most obvious of narrative cliches: the stud drifter bedding the sexually repressed, kept woman (see Schizo). Levy also gives what at times is a nicely sympathetic performance as the abusive husband.

    Soon after Félix and Chango arrived in Buenos Aires, however, I lost interest in the film and began waiting for it to end. Films of the type that play at film festivals typically resist narrative closure; they delight, instead, in ambiguity, allowing viewers to draw conclusions of their own. I’ll admit to a strong preference for this type myself, but I’m beginning to wonder how often “ambiguity” is, in fact, a cheap excuse for sloppy writing. Little Sky is clearly intended to be a social film with political ends, and so I recognize Menis’s need to carry her story through to its predetermined, tragic finale. But I think it would be a much better film if she spent even more time developing her three main characters at the farmhouse and ended it on the train to the city. Ambiguity. Just how I like it. So can this desire for ambiguity be a political or intellectual cop-out? That question, to be honest, interests me more than this film did.

  • Moolaade (2004)

    Moolaade (2004)

    Dir. by Ousmane Sembene

    Sembene introduced his film by reminding his mostly white, mostly Western audience that Africa — the entire continent, its nations, its governments, and its people — is experiencing a period of unprecedented transition. There was no moralizing or condemnation in his tone, not even a suggestion of the catastrophic crises and genocides that fill the back pages of our newspapers. Africa is in transition, he told us, and this film is about that transition.

    By the time it reached Toronto, Moolaadé was already the talk of the festival, having garnered much acclaim at Cannes from such influential voices as Roger Ebert, who is actively campaigning on its behalf. I knew only that it was a film about the traditional practice of salinde, or female circumcision, that Sembene was generally known as the “grandfather of African cinema,” and that several of my friends were jealous of my getting a ticket to the sold-out screening. In fact, genital mutilation is but one of the film’s many concerns. The salinde serves more generally as a site of contention between the women who, newly empowered by the creeping influence of Western humanism and technology, begin to rebel against the patriarchal structures of their society — salinde is a site of contention between these strong, young women and the men who wish to maintain their patriarchal hold on power.

    Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly) is a second wife who, still scarred from her own circumcision, had refused years earlier to have her only daughter “cleansed.” In the opening moments of the film, four young girls come to Collé for similar protection, and she obliges, instituting a moolaadé, or a ceremonial zone of refuge. Her decision sets in motion the principle conflicts in the film: the older generation of women (particularly those who perform the ritual) vs. those women who oppose it; the men of the village whose identity is founded on traditional notions of masculinity vs. those who offer an alternate model (the Western-educated son or the big city mercenary); and, more simply, the old (including a particular interpretation of Islam) vs. the new (symbolized by the ubiquitous radios that blare from all corners of the village).

    By the standards with which I typically judge a film, Moolaadé is too sentimental and predictable, and its performances are uneven, at best. (The notable exception being Coulibaly, who delivers my favorite performance of the year.) And yet watching Moolaadé is a gut-churning experience, in part, I suspect, because of its close proximity to “reality.” Sembene told us that he shot on location in a typical West African village and that he cast untrained locals in many of the speaking parts. These particular young women that we watch on screen represent thousands of others just like them, and their very real investment in the “transition” is apparent.

    I hope this is a fair comparison — I always worry about applying Western models to non-Western stories, imperializing them, so to speak — but as I watched Moolaadé I was reminded of certain American literatures of the late-19th century, another significant period of transition. If Moolaadé is didactic, then its didacticism might be forgiven: What value, after all, can be found in the other side of the genital mutilation (or slavery or suffrage) debate? And, a question of even greater value, I think: When is unbridled emotionalism (which I often too casually dismiss as “sentiment”) a perfectly appropriate and even politically resonant response to particular conditions? The emotional trajectory of Moolaadé reaches its climax when Collé is punished for her transgressions. It’s a brutal scene, but I found myself more deeply moved by a more quiet moment that followed. It’s the sound of a crying mother. That’s it. A crying mother. And it worked, breaking through my cynicism and emotional distance. Highly recommended.

  • Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

    Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004)

    Dir. by Theo Angelopoulos

    Angelopoulos introduced his latest with very few words. It is to be the first of three films about the life of a Greek woman who manages to survive the 20th century, and its concern is “the human condition.” What more would you expect?

    The Weeping Meadow opens with its first of many meticulously composed, extreme long shots. It is 1919, and a group of refugees have made land near Thessaloniki. At the center of the frame are Spyros (Vasilis Kolovos), his wife and son (Nikos Poursanidis), and Eleni (Alexandra Aidini), the young orphan he has adopted. The Trilogy will be Eleni’s story, and in The Weeping Meadow we are given the first 40 years of it — her love of Spyros’s son, her giving birth to twins, and the tragedy of her many losses during World War II and the Greek civil war that followed.

    The Weeping Meadow takes its shape from Classical Tragedy, but the Fates, in this case, are not so deterministic as to run trod over the complexities of life. While bathed in a sheen of melancholia and mourning, the film still takes great delight in the intensity of young love, the vitality of community, and the simple pleasures of music. Eleni’s young husband is a gifted accordionist whose original composition is developed first on-screen and is then folded into the film’s score, returning occasionally in the final act to comfort Eleni like a Greek chorus.

    This was my first Angelopoulos film, and so, perhaps, others who are more familiar with his work and who are accustomed to seeing it projected in 35mm will be less overwhelmed by the film than I was. I sat there in a stupor, to be honest, constantly in awe of the immensity of his imagination. The still image posted above is just one of thirty or forty that could be stripped from its context and hung on a gallery wall. And equally impressive were the choreographed camera movements that lasted for minutes at a time, exploring landscapes and interiors with the detailed eye of a great novelist. I actually gasped at the end of one shot, which like Russian Ark in miniature, captures an entire drama in a single take. Angelopoulos’s camera follows his young lovers through a noisy dance hall where they are confronted by a threat from their past. Setup, conflict, resolution — all in a single movement. Unbelievable.

    One week and nearly twenty films later, my imagination is still alive with memories of The Weeping Meadow. There are images in this film — sheep hanging from a tree, water rising around an ancient village, a floating funeral procession, a field of billowing white sheets — that I would not have imagined possible. Like the first time I saw Tarkovsky and Cassavetes, seeing Angelopoulos has forced me to reconsider the potential of cinema. Highly recommended.

  • Schizo (2004)

    Schizo (2004)

    Dir. by Guka Omarova

    Omarova’s debut takes its title from a nickname given to the main character. Schizo (Olzhas Nusuppaev) is 15 years old and a bit slow; his classmates abuse him and exploit his gullibility. He is soon hired by his mother’s thug boyfriend (Eduard Tabyschev) to recruit unemployed laborers for illegal boxing matches. However, when the first man he recruits dies after the fight, Schizo is drawn into a new life. Like Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes’s La Promesse, Schizo tells the coming-of-age story of a young man who commits to helping a woman and her young child, first out of obligation and, later, out of love. As I told a friend after the screening, Schizo is the most heart-warming bare-knuckle boxing movie I’ve ever seen.

    Told in minimalist style, with long takes, little nondiegetic sound, and a cast that includes several nonprofessional actors, Schizo is always compelling to watch, even if the story is, at times, too predictable. Fifteen minutes in, I was concerned that it would all collapse into either Of Mice and Men tragedy or Forrest Gump sentiment, so I was impressed with Omarova’s handling of Schizo, who, as it turns out, isn’t terribly slow after all and whose decisions constantly surprised me. I also really enjoyed Olga Landina’s performance as the young mother whom Schizo befriends. Like Natalie Press in My Summer of Love, Landina has a compelling face of a type that I see too seldom on the screen. Both actresses reminded me a bit of Badlands-era Sissy Spacek.

    Schizo is not a film that I am anxious to revisit, but it does exemplify one aspect of the festival that I greatly enjoyed: the opportunity to encounter a new voice in cinema, and one from a place that I will likely never visit. A woman from Kazakhstan recently began attending my English as a Second Language course, and I was surprised to find this person whom I had assumed was Chinese speaking Russian. On several occasions during the screening of Schizo, when the narrative was losing hold of my interest, I just sat and studied the people who populate the film. Kazakhstan has been called the “crossroads of Europe and Asia,” and that history is written into its faces.

  • Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Tell Them Who You Are (2004)

    Dir. by Mark S. Wexler

    Tell Them Who You Are has the best opening scene of any film I saw at this year’s festival. Haskell Wexler is standing in his camera equipment room, taking stock of his inventory for an upcoming sale. When his son Mark, who is shooting the documentary that we are watching, asks his dad to explain where they are standing, Haskell shakes his head, twists his face with exasperation, and says (I’m paraphrasing from memory here): “No, Mark. You’re holding the fucking camera. Just shoot the room, and you’re audience will figure it out. If this is what your fucking movie is going to be like, if you’re planning to just shoot a bunch of talking heads, then the hell with it. I want nothing to do with it.”

    It would be nearly impossible to make a dull documentary about Haskell Wexler. Now in his mid-80s, Wexler is as sharp and as full of piss as ever — still decrying injustice wherever he finds it, still ridiculing the mistakes of other filmmakers whenever he encounters them. Having shot nearly fifty features over the past five decades (including John Sayles’s Silver City, which also played at the festival), Wexler is justified in thinking himself an authority on the subject of filmmaking, which is why Tell Them Who You Are is such a fascinating movie. Being on the other side of the camera forces Wexler to revisit the aesthetic decisions that guided him through the making of his own documentaries forty years earlier, groundbreaking social films such as The Bus (1965), Medium Cool (1969), and Introduction to the Enemy (1974). He can barely tolerate his son’s direction at times, and that tension is at the heart of the film.

    Mark Wexler is quite good with a camera himself, however, and his film is remarkably well-constructed. What begins as a standard Biography-style portrait, complete with childhood photos, juicy gossip, and celebrity testimonials, slowly evolves into, first, a self-reflexive commentary on the ethics of documentary filmmaking and, finally, a touching story of forgiveness and reconciliation. One of the final images is of Haskell sitting at a monitor, watching his son’s completed film. Mark doesn’t linger too long on the shot or allow it to become sentimental, but the emotion is evident on his father’s face and it speaks volumes. Mark seemed reticent to speak too candidly after the screening but did acknowledge that having a camera fixed between them offered both men a much-appreciated filter and that their relationship has, in many ways, been healed by the process.

    I hope that Tell Them Who You Are finds decent distribution, and given the recent critical and popular success of so many documentaries, perhaps it will. It was one of my favorites of the festival, largely because of Haskell Wexler himself. His bottomless hatred of corporate interests and political conservatives (like his son) is inspiring and laugh-out-loud funny. But the film also exposes his pain and, though he would be loathe to admit it, his regret, particularly in a moving scene with his ex-wife, Mark’s mother. Another high recommendation.

  • Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Earth and Ashes (2004)

    Dir. by Atiq Rahimi

    Days after his village is destroyed in a bombing raid, Dastaguir (Abdul Ghani) and his five-year-old grandson Yacine (Jawan Mard Homayoun) jump from the back of a pickup truck and take their seats at a desert crossroads, where they wait and wait for a ride to a nearby mine. Dastaguir is charged with the horrifying task of notifying his son that the young man’s wife and mother are dead and that his son, Yacine, is now deaf. Dastaguir is worried for his son’s sanity and is plagued by memories of his daughter-in-law’s shaming, which he was unable to prevent.

    As I stepped out of the theater, a woman beside me dismissed Earth and Ashes as an “Afghani Waiting for Godot“; I agree with the description but not the dismissal. Here, unlike Beckett’s play, the absurdity of the situation is grounded in a real historical moment. Earth and Ashes is not only an allegory for some vague existential crisis (though it is certainly also that); instead, the film reveals the human cost of a particular tragedy. By the time Dastaguir recounted the story of his village’s destruction to the fourth stranger, and after hearing yet one more weary soul beg God’s blessings for the dead, I began to experience something of the old man’s exhaustion and helplessness. To be frank, I was embarrassed by it — embarrassed to be sitting in an air conditioned movie theater while on vacation, taking “pleasure” from the suffering depicted on screen. (Doug and I had a great discussion afterwards about film tastes and political sensibilities, but I’ll save that one for another day.)

    Earth and Ashes is a jaw-droppingly beautiful film as well, shot on location in wide-angle 35mm (Scope?) and featuring countless elegant crane and tracking shots. In his introduction of the film, Rahimi recounted the risks he and his crew faced by shooting in Afghanistan, particularly because the film features female nudity. The landscape, he claimed, is critical to the story, and I would agree, even extending the concept to the landscapes of Afghani faces, young and old.

    Existentialism — to borrow momentarily from my acquaintance’s allusion to Godot — demands that we find some measure of hope in our suffering, that in our acceptance of life’s absurdity we are making some heroic gesture toward freedom. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes. Rahimi seems driven by a similar conviction. I’m going to cheat and borrow from Doug’s review:

    the final sequence of the film is comprised of a gradual focus: a man leaves a conversation, walks through the desert, becomes isolated, begins to sing. The image fades but his singing continues in darkness, a tribute to human dignity and its perseverance through time.

    Despite the hectic pace of the film festival, the audience sat quietly for two or three minutes in complete darkness, listening to the old man’s song. It plays like a benediction. Highly Recommended.

  • 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences (2004)

    Dir. by Raymond Depardon

    10e Chambre, instants d’audiences is 105 minutes of documentary footage shot within a French District courtroom. We watch as Madame Justice Michèle Bernard-Requin hears the cases brought against twelve defendants (culled from the 169 that Depardon originally shot). Most are there on misdemeanor offenses: drunk driving, petty theft, possession of a weapon, selling marijuana. And in nearly every case we watch the process from start to finish, from plea to verdict.

    During the screening of 10e Chambre, instants d’audiences, I was quite disappointed by the film, but even then I knew that my disappointment was with the audience rather than with the film itself. At the Sunday screening — and friends who saw it on Tuesday report a very different experience — 10e Chambre played as pure comedy. (One friend, a TIFF veteran, argues that crowds are different during the opening weekend, when more people dress up and come out to experience the festival itself rather than to see the films, and I think he might be right.)

    The idea of 10e Chambre as “comedy” is quite disturbing to me. And I’ve come to realize that that is partly Depardon’s point. He crafts the film so that our allegiances immediately fall to the side of the witty and cynical Judge, whose clever retorts to the first few defendants are, at times, well justified. But by the time we are laughing at a young man who is clearly under the influence of a narcotic while in the courtroom, the joke has gone on too long. We are now no longer well-heeled sophisticates at an international film festival; we are Middle Americans, smoking pot, watching Jerry Springer, and laughing at the poor clods who are too poorly educated, too economically burdened, too mentally incapacitated, or ( perhaps most damning of all) too dark-skinned to know any better.

    10e Chambre began to open up for me when my friend Girish described that laughter as a Rorschach Test. What do we laugh at? How do we choose where to direct our derision? And why do we often side with those in authority? Depardon shoots each of the defendants from the same static, low-angle position, giving us a perspective of the criminal that is similar (metaphorically speaking) to the Judge’s: he or she is a disembodied head, divorced from context or backstory, who is offered only a few moments to justify his or her behavior. The opportunity to judge them is impossibly seductive, as my audience proved, and Depardon invites us to do so by not revealing the verdicts of the final cases. I have no doubt how most in that theater would have ruled.

    As a side note, one of my friends who attended the Tuesday screening reports that one or two members of that audience also felt the need to laugh throughout much of the film. Not surprisingly, the social pressure of being the lone voice laughing in a hushed room led them to suppress that urge during the last half hour. The analogy to being a lone voice of dissent, whether in an important public discourse or, say, a jury room, is fascinating. This will be a wonderful film to teach.

  • 3-Iron (2004)

    3-Iron (2004)

    Dir. by Kim Ki-duk

    Jae Hee plays Tae-suk, a young man who breaks into homes, prepares meals, bathes and naps, then repays the homeowner’s generosity by performing small acts of kindness: washing clothes, repairing broken electronics, and the like. While squatting in the most opulent of his many homes, Tae-suk discovers that he is not alone. Sun-hwa (Lee Seung-yun), a former model, is trapped there by her husband, bruised and beaten. Tae-suk rescues her, and the two become accomplices and lovers, moving from house to house in complete silence, never speaking even a word to one another.

    The description of 3-Iron in the TIFF catalog begins with the following quote from Kim:

    All of us are empty houses, waiting anxiously for somebody to unlock and liberate us….

    It’s the perfect synopsis of 3-Iron, a fable for our times. Each house that Tae-suk enters acts as an embodiment of its absent owner, and with time and repetition we in the audience begin to anticipate the sameness of it all — the conventions, the status symbols, the stuff. Even Sun-hwa, when we first meet her, is property, and the joy of watching 3-Iron comes from seeing her beauty emerge along with her individualized identity. The bruises on her face fade as she gains confidence and as her fate becomes more tightly bound to Tae-suk’s.

    3-Iron is one of the films that I saw at TIFF that I feel could benefit from some trimming, and I’ll be curious to see if the cut that showed at Toronto is the same version released in the West. (3-Iron was picked up for distribution soon after its first screening.) The film gets its title from the golf club that Tae-suk and several other characters use to enact vengeance upon one another, and while it makes for a nice metaphor (what better symbol to show the divide between the haves and have-nots?), several of the more violent sequences created frustrating tonal shifts and pacing problems, particularly an odd scene that takes place in an underground parking garage, which could be cut completely.

    Otherwise, though, I quite liked 3-Iron. The final act of the film shows Tae-suk alone in a prison cell, where he seems to transform slowly into a ghost. The sequences are just stunning to look at, and they’re cut together with a real grace. Again, like a fable, there’s something almost magical about the prison scenes, and they contain some of the images that have lingered longest in my imagination. Not a perfect film, but one that I will look forward to revisiting.

  • Childstar (2004)

    Childstar (2004)

    Dir. by Don McKellar

    My first and only five-film day of the festival began early Sunday morning with Don McKellar’s latest, Childstar. McKellar stars as Rick Schiller, a cinema studies professor and experimental filmmaker who finds himself working as a chauffeur to Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall), an adolescent heartthrob whose latest film, The American Son, is shooting in Toronto. Schiller soon hooks up with Burns’ mother (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), becomes Burns’ legal guardian, and guides the young actor through his inevitable and by-the-numbers coming of age.

    During the post-screening Q&A, McKellar told the story of the film’s inspiration. (Here’s another version of the same story, as reported in the Toronto Sun.)

    It was the Dreamworks party for American Beauty, and I met Haley Joel Osment at the bar. . . . I don’t know what he was drinking, but I’m sure it wasn’t scandalous. Anyway, I talked to him for quite awhile before I realized he was 12 or whatever. He was so mature, there were no adults around him, he was just talking. And I thought what a potent symbol he was of something — of my experience of Hollywood. He was an unnaturally precocious kid in a culture where kids act too old and adults act too young.

    Part family drama, part satire of Hollywood, Childstar allows McKellar plenty of room to poke fun at the film “industry,” with its gangster-like agents, manipulative and cost-conscious producers, and exploitive parents. And for the most part, it works. I laughed out loud several times and enjoyed the relationship between Schiller and Burns. McKellar has the perfect face for the role; he always looks vaguely exasperated by the waste and ego of celebrity, and his intelligence and wit make him an entertaining guide through it all.

    I decided to see Childstar mostly for the opportunity to hear McKellar introduce it — I’ve been a big fan since first seeing him in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica — and his introduction set up the best laugh of the morning. His microphone was positioned at the bottom right corner of the screen, and he began by saying that he had promised himself that he would never be “one of those directors who goes on and on about the film, sucking the life out of the room, but that he wanted to take a minute or two to explain why he felt that he must make this particular film.” Remember that if you get a chance to see Childstar. (McKellar held little hope for American distribution, by the way, but said that it will be shown widely in Canada, beginning in October.)

  • My Summer of Love

    My Summer of Love

    Dir. by Pawel Pawlikowski

    Mona (Natalie Press), a working-class girl who runs the local pub with her brother, meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt), a wealthy trouble-maker who has returned home to the family estate after being expelled from boarding school. Bored and lonely, they find comfort in their relationship, though, as becomes increasingly obvious, that relationship is built from lies and games. In the final act, those lies unravel, and Mona, we are led to believe, finds new strength and independence from having survived the experience.

    My Summer of Love received a lot of “buzz,” as they say, in Toronto, and I would guess that most of it was generated by Press’s performance, which is a lot of fun to watch. I can’t recall another character quite like Mona. She has the potential to become that loathsome stereotype, the “blue collar girl with a heart of gold who will teach the rich people how to really experience life,” but Mona is too world-weary and cynical to buy into such a lie. She’s learned to protect herself with sarcasm and irony, so when she does drop her guard, when she does allow some vulnerability, the betrayals by Tasmin and her brother wound all the more deeply.

    During his Q&A, Pawlikowski said that he was drawn to this story because he is interested in characters who are seeking transcendence, whether through love or sex or religion. His response points to my great frustration with the film, which is that he seems to equate the three and is deeply suspicious of the real value to be found in any of them. As J. Robert Parks told me after the screening, it’s terribly annoying when a filmmaker expects us to find victory and personal triumph in a cliche.

    I was also frustrated because My Summer of Love has the potential to offer an insightful portrait of a Christian struggling with the consequences of his new-found faith, but, again, the film instead reduces him to cliche. Mona’s brother Phil (Paddy Considine) has become an evangelical while in prison and has exercised his faith by closing the family pub and turning it into a meeting hall for Bible studies and prayer. I was especially touched by one scene in which Mona comes to Phil, needing comfort, needing to talk to the brother who is now her only family. He hugs her, rocks her in his arms, then begins to pray over her. It’s a moment I’ve experienced too many times in my own life — a Christian, acting with the very best intentions, falls back on old routines, praying for God’s help instead of looking that person in the eye, speaking directly to them, and doing something to meet their needs.

    Considine was also there for the Q&A, and he mentioned how much he valued and respected the friendships he had made with evangelicals while researching the role, and it shows in his performance, which is quite good. But Pawlikowski’s script is bound too tightly to a banal narrative arc that demands Phil’s faith be superficial. He will inevitably be seduced by Tasmin, inevitably revert to his violent ways, inevitably forsake his Bible study friends. We get one final glimpse of him near the end of the film, his face in his hands, which, I suppose, is intended to suggest his “struggle” and the possibility of redemption, but it’s too little, too late. I quite liked the film for the first hour because the characters continually surprised me, which made the by-the-numbers finale all the more disappointing.

  • Nobody Knows (2004)

    Nobody Knows (2004)

    Dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda

    After Life is one of my favorite films of the past five years, so for that reason alone, I was very much looking forward to Kore-eda’s latest, Nobody Knows, the story of four young siblings whose mother abandons them to find work in another city. Unfortunately, because of a few wrong turns and some confusion regarding the location of my tickets, I missed the first hour of the film and will, therefore, keep my comments brief.

    I entered the theater just as the oldest child, Chunan (played by Yuya Yagira, winner of the best actor prize at Cannes), comes to realize that their mother will not be returning. We watch as they adapt to life alone: washing their clothes in the park, collecting day-old food from the back doors of neighborhood stores, searching for discarded change in pay phones and vending machines.

    Kore-eda shoots the exteriors from a great distance, using long lenses that flatten the depth of field. Doing so allows his young actors to move naturally, freed from the close presence of camera and crew. There is nothing self-conscious or “actorly” in their performances, which lends added weight to the inevitable tragedy of their situation.

    Nobody Knows ends, not surprisingly, in a freeze frame, the most obvious but certainly not only allusion to The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut’s film, Kore-eda’s demands that we sympathize with its young protagonist and judge the adults and the systems that have failed them. I have some problems with the film but will reserve judgment until after seeing it in its entirety. I would imagine that it will find relatively wide distribution.

  • Motion Pictures During World War I and II

    Motion Pictures During World War I and II

    Note: Writing an entry for an encyclopedia intended for high school and college libraries, as it turns out, is a lot like writing an undergraduate research paper: the concerns seem to be quantity rather than quality, breadth rather than depth. I found the process more than a bit maddening.

    The American motion picture industry began making war movies soon after its first filmmakers stepped behind their cameras and yelled, “Action!” Over the many decades since, American audiences have come to experience war—its spectacle, excitement, sacrifice, and tragedy—via the larger-than-life visions projected on the nation’s countless silver screens. Because the Hollywood film industry blossomed during the early decades of the twentieth century, it was inevitably shaped by America’s involvement in the World Wars. And, conversely, the films produced and distributed by Hollywood’s studios contributed directly to the nation’s war efforts. When the call to war was sounded, filmmakers and audiences alike reported for duty.

    In 1914, barely twenty years after Thomas Edison’s first moving pictures were exhibited in New York City, filmmaker D. W. Griffith employed engineers from West Point as technical advisors on his Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation (1915). The film startled audiences with its large-scale, realistic battle sequences, and set a standard for spectacle against which all contemporary war and historical films were judged. Audiences proved willing to overlook certain weaknesses in plot and characterization if the combat scenes were exciting and appeared authentic. To that end, Griffith borrowed Civil War artillery pieces and nearly bankrupted himself in his efforts to secure period costumes and to build convincing locations. Birth of a Nation set standards in other ways as well. As Lawrence Suid notes, American films made before the Vietnam era seldom focus on any but the most glamorous aspects of war. “Battle was not always shown as pleasant, but the films made it clear that pain was necessary for ultimate victory” (p. 3).

    World War I

    By 1916, the nation was deeply divided on the question of war itself, with President Woodrow Wilson struggling to maintain his non-interventionist policy toward Europe—this despite growing numbers of attacks on American civilians abroad and America’s growing financial interests in the war. That ambivalence is reflected in the anti-war movies of the day, including Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Herbert Brenon’s War Brides (1916), and Thomas Ince’s Civilization (1916), all of which depict the toll of war without seriously addressing its root causes or complexities. Though lambasted by critics, Civilization, in particular, was a massive hit, and some have argued that its popularity and its pacifist sentiment contributed directly to Wilson’s re-election.

    Soon after war was declared, however, Hollywood filmmakers, like much of the general population, mobilized to support the effort. Popular pacifist films from the year before were now heavily censored, if not banned entirely, and movie stars began to pitch liberty bonds. Even Griffith made Hearts of the World (1917), a contribution to the British propaganda effort, and studio films were equally polemical. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) was the most popular of the lot, but its success can be attributed in large part to its leading man, Rudolph Valentino, then Hollywood’s brightest star.

    The Interwar Years

    A notable change in the cultural climate had occurred by 1924, however, when King Vidor set out to make a realistic war movie told from a soldier’s perspective. Hollywood again turned to Washington, this time requesting trucks, troops, and a hundred airplanes. The Big Parade (1925) found great success with audiences and critics alike, despite its complex representation of man in war. The film’s protagonist is shipped to the western front where he loses a leg and watches his two best friends die, before returning to a very different life back home. Ultimately, The Big Parade questions accepted notions of heroism and imagines war as a deeply flawed and very human endeavor. That the War Department would so enthusiastically support such a production distinguishes the isolationist 1920s and 1930s from the two decades that would follow.

    The other landmark film of the interwar years is All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s blistering anti-war novel. Told from a German perspective, the film was a risk for Universal Pictures that proved wise: All Quiet on the Western Front won two Academy Awards and is now considered one of the greatest war films of all time. The Russian-born Milestone, who had edited Army film footage while in the Signal Corps, and his German cinematographer, Karl Freund, commanded a cast of thousands and a budget of nearly $1.5 million, but their film soars on its cutting between epic battle sequences and smaller, quieter moments. The most memorable is a shot of the lead character being killed as he reaches for a butterfly, a single image that encapsulated widespread anti-war sentiment.

    The Buildup to War

    By the end of the 1930s, the American film industry was nearing its pinnacle, having weathered the storm of the Depression with comparative ease. Hollywood produced a string of recruiting pictures throughout the decade, including Here Comes the Navy (1934), Devil Dogs of the Air (1935), and Submarine D-1 (1937), all directed by naval reservist Lloyd Bacon, but, mirroring the climate of the country and the White House, studio executives steered clear of storylines that addressed German aggression in Europe. The most popular war film of the era, in fact, is arguably the most popular film of all time: the Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind (1939).

    Like every other facet of American life, the course of Hollywood film history was dramatically altered by the events of December 7, 1941. The three months preceding Pearl Harbor had seen the opening of a Senate investigation into the production of “propaganda” films by the major Hollywood studios. Leading isolationists accused the studios of attempting to hasten America’s involvement in World War II by producing “preparedness” films such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), Dive Bomber (1941), Sergeant York (1941), and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), which was deemed “prematurely anti-fascist” by Senator D. W. Clark (D-ID). The investigation proved to be little more than political posturing, however, and was abruptly abandoned when America entered the fray.

    World War II

    When President Roosevelt declared war, Hollywood studios took advantage of the explosive levels of public interest in modern combat (and the box office revenue it generated). Likewise, the War Department became keenly aware of how the cinema might be used for its own purposes. A symbiotic relationship quickly developed, and by the end of 1942 several films based on actual events and made with the assistance of the armed services were released to a public brimming with patriotism and clamoring for swift and decisive victory. Wake Island (1942), Air Force (1943), and Bataan (1943) depict the Marines, Air Force, and Army respectively in their heroic efforts following devastating, “real life” setbacks in the South Pacific.

    This first wave of World War II films helped to establish a template for what would become the standard service film. A “crusty old sergeant” serves as father-figure to a heterogeneous pack of raw recruits. His brave young men fight nobly against insurmountable odds, all in hopes of returning to their faithful women “back home.” The collective message of the films, quite simply, is that America was in for a good, hard fight, but that through perseverance and bravery, democracy would inevitably triumph over fascism. Steven Spielberg, like so many filmmakers before him, would return to this template six decades later with Saving Private Ryan (1998).

    The American film industry’s contributions to the war effort extended far beyond the service film genre. Many actors enlisted in active service, most notably Jimmy Stewart, who was inducted into the Army Air Corps nine months before Pearl Harbor and eventually flew twenty missions with the 445th Bomb Group. The studios also produced a series of propaganda, training, health, and bond-buying films featuring Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the stable of popular Walt Disney characters. The animation studio at Warner Brothers likewise enlisted the talents of its Looney Tunes crew—director Chuck Jones, writer Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, and voice artist Mel Blanc among them—to bring to life Private Snafu. Meaning “Situation Normal, All F—ed Up,” a common expression among soldiers of the day, Private Snafu would regularly make outlandish mistakes and teach valuable lessons in the process.

    In the final years of World War II, the studios continued to churn out timely combat films, including Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), They Were Expendable (1945), and The Story of G. I. Joe (1945). But the war also served as a backdrop to films from other genres. The most famous is Casablanca (1942), Michael Curtiz’s romance starring Humphrey Bogart. Rick’s Place, the Moroccan night club in which most of the film is set, serves as a microcosm of its day, with a cast of characters that includes Nazis and “good Germans,” freedom fighters and politically-neutral French, Americans and Soviets. World War II also found its way into the plots of comedies such as Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) and All Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), and also Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Lifeboat (1944) and Notorious (1946).

    America’s war movies are snapshots of their day, capturing, for example, the isolationist mood of the 1930s and the patriotic zeal of the 1940s. As America entered the Cold War, that trend continued. The battlefields of the Western Front, Normandy, and the South Pacific served metaphorically for Korea, Vietnam, and the potentially apocalyptic stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union. War films serve as public landmarks around which the American public rallies, mourns, applauds, and protests. Fighting war on the big screen is surely entertainment and big business, but it is also catharsis, a safe place for Americans to confront the consequences of their nation’s conflicts.