Long Pauses

Category: Film

  • Calendar (1993)

    Calendar (1993)

    In Atom Egoyan’s remarkable film Calendar (1993), a photographer and his wife (played by Egoyan and Arsinee Khanjian) travel to Armenia to take pictures of ancient churches for a calendar project. Once there, they are led through the countryside — and through the country’s historical narratives — by Ashot Adamian, an Armenian man who tells stories, sings native songs, and, eventually, vies for Khanjian’s affection. It’s a love triangle, but one with interesting metaphoric weight. Egoyan, the intellectual Westerner far-removed from his Armenian roots, is juxtaposed against Adamian, and Khanjian stands somewhere in between, torn between two symbols of her own hyphenated identity.

    Khanjian is, in both a literal and metaphoric sense, the film’s translator, and the process of translation — with all of its inevitable frustrations and miscommunications — is the film’s main subject. Specifically, Egoyan is concerned with telling the stories of the Armenian diaspora, all the while knowing that culture, politics, technology, and human memory will constantly reshape and reinterpret those stories. Like Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up, Calendar represents this dilemma even in its form, blurring the lines between documentary and narrative film, fact and fiction.

    Made for German television and with a budget of only $100,000, Calendar is one of the most compelling and stylistically inventive films I’ve seen this year. Typical of Egoyan’s work, it is structured around twelve, non-linear episodes (one for each month of the calendar) and alternates between film and video footage. At times, the characters address the camera directly, their improvised dialogue lending the film some air of verisimilitude; at others, it all has a very staged feel, particularly when we watch Egoyan, now back at home in Canada, going through the rehearsed motions of dating. Calendar is quite a display of filmmaking — probably Egoyan’s best, this side of The Sweet Hereafter.

  • But Is It Funny?

    Dale Peck at Slate offers the best critical reading of HBO’s Angels that I’ve found. He points out something that has bothered me a bit as well: the film just isn’t very funny. Which is a shame, because the play is really funny. Unlike so many of the TV critics who have offered their half-informed opinions over the last few weeks, Peck also understands the theatrical traditions from which the plays emerged and against which they so forcefully reacted. This is just good stuff:

    Ultimately, though, the real problem is that Angels is and remains a play, not a movie. It is deliberately, powerfully anachronistic in its approach to narrative, updating–one wants to say outing–the mid-century work of Williams and Albee. Though Nichols labors doggedly at filling in the spaces even the most lavish theatrical productions leave blank, his sets come across as cluttered, unnuanced, unnecessary; his frequent angel-eye perspectives seem thrown in just, you know, because. In particular, the addition of New York City vistas, the panoramas and facades left out of the play’s backdrops, seem shuffled in from a mismatched deck. That’s because Angels, even more than most plays, is steeped in conversation, soliloquy, the linguistic pursuit of ideas. Its characters interact with each other, not their environment, because (as the subtitle reminds us) the play is a fantasia: There is something internal and not quite real about it.

    I also like his conclusion:

    Whether you regard capitalism as the thing that will save the world or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven capable of assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them. By which I mean that there was a George Bush as president when Kushner first wrote Angels, and there is a George Bush as president now. By which I mean that perhaps it isn’t the movie that doesn’t do the play justice, it’s the times. By which I mean, finally, that as soon as I finished watching Angels, the only thing I could think of doing was watching it again because I wanted it to have another chance.

  • Minor Quibbles

    Well, crap. I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were both brilliant. But why, in their trimming and reshaping, did Kushner and Nichols have to cut my two favorite lines from Millennium Approaches? When we first see Harper, she really should be saying:

    People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining…beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart…

    When you look at the ozone layer, from the outside, from a spaceship, it looks like a pale blue halo, a gentle, shimmering, aureole encircling the atmosphere encircling the earth. Thirty miles above our heads, a thin layer of three-atom oxygen molecules, product of photosynthesis, which explains the fussy vegetable preference for visible light, its rejection of darker rays and emanations. Danger from without. It’s a kind of gift, from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself. But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way…This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn’t be left alone. [ellipses are Kushner’s]

    So much of the play is built from that imagery, established so early on. I imagine that Nichols thought it just too much for the opening moments of the film — too theatrical, too obvious, too wordy for a character we had just met. It’s Kushner at his best, though. “Systems of defense giving way” is, I think, the play’s richest metaphor.

    I was even more annoyed by the cutting of this brief exchange, which really should follow Belize’s description of the sky as “mauve.”

    Belize: All day long it’s felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this…ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it — can you smell it?
    Louis: Smell what?
    Belize: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

    Perestroika is about softness, compliance, forgiveness, and grace — grace, most of all. Can’t wait until next week.

  • Still Cranky (After All These Years)

    Armond White is the crankiest film critic this side of Ray Carney, and God bless him for it. In this week’s piece for the New York Press, “Entertainment, Weakly,” he rips into Ron Howard’s latest, The Missing, along with the glossy magazines that would promote it as pop art. I especially enjoyed White’s take on Entertainment Weekly‘s recent feature, “50 Greatest Tear-jerkers”:

    In pop culture there are few sights more maddening than seeing a great work of art stripped of its human essence. EW treats Sounder as if it were Disney’s Old Yeller — a blunder that exposes the magazine’s approach to pop as affluent kiddie fodder. When cultural journalism was healthier, critics proudly sought evidence of profundity and depth. Sounder was produced in an era when American filmmakers and audiences valued a critique of social conditions and admired signs of human endeavor every bit as much as the Italian Neorealists had. Today, that respect is reserved for Iranian movies. EW’s insistence on further reducing movies to a marketable commodity only recommends the shallowest audience response.

    White doesn’t allow his fellow critics off the hook, either. After calling A Beautiful Mind “the most ridiculous film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar (turning a real-life story of psychosis into an action-adventure/love story),” he then blames its win not on that most scarred of whipping-boys — the Academy itself — but on his colleagues, who failed to fulfill their most noble function:

    Critics didn’t properly lambaste it, subsequently accepting the ludicrous, sentimental premise as entertainment. That meant Howard got to work his bad magic once again.

    I don’t read White for his reviews, I read him for his attitude, and I wish there were more out there like him.

  • Film Journey

    I like this theatre. The set up is a little strange, the bottom floor being too low, sloping up, and the balcony being too high. But I have fond memories of watching Ulysses’ Gaze here a while back. They’re showing everything from The Jungle Book 2 to Straub/Huillet. It makes me wonder how the French distribution system works. The cost of renting prints must be much less. By looking at their screening schedule, you would think they have multiple theatres. But there is in fact only one theatre, and they still find the time to show 24 different movies and two programs of shorts. So why does my local theatre have 18 theatres, but only 10 different movies (and all uninteresting)?

    Over at Film Journey Jonathan Takagi has posted a series of capsule reviews from his recent trip to Paris. Over at Long Pauses I’m trying desperately to not choke on my own jealousy.

  • Roth, on Film

    We all know that Stanley Kauffman, that grand icon of American film-reviewing, has been with The New Republic since 1958. But did you know that he was preceded immediately by a young punk of a wannabe novelist named Philip Roth? In June 1957, Roth — then a 24-year-old instructor at the University of Chicago — began his nine-month stint with the magazine, where he reported on the latest Hollywood and television offerings. I read through all of his reviews this morning and stumbled upon a few nuggets.

    First, Roth the critic. Despite a general antipathy toward “ideology” that has characterized so much of his work over the years, Roth gets surprisingly political in his critique of Studio “message” films, particularly those that treat America’s race problems with, in his words, “Mother Goose simplicity.” His reviews of Island in the Sun and Something of Value — the former a Harry Belafonte vehicle, the latter a Sidney Poitier picture — chastise the filmmakers for surrendering to empty sentimentality and senseless moralizing. Referring to the climax of Something of Value, in which Poitier dies tragically, leaving his child to be carried off by Rock Hudson, Roth writes:

    The next generation, the picture seems to cry, for them it will be better! But I keep wanting to know about this generation. . . . [I]sn’t it possible to live with a man when he is not like your brother? What I want to know is when we’re going to be ready to make that picture.

    Roth’s finest moment as a film critic, though, comes in his assessment of A Bridge on the River Kwai. I say “finest,” perhaps, because his ambivalence toward Lean’s “masterpiece” mirrors my own:

    The Colonel, then, does not appear to have actually chosen to blow up his bridge, nor does he live to see it destroyed. And thus he is robbed of that final agony and awakening that might have made of him a tragic figure. He does, of course, have an awakening: “What have I done?” he finally asks. But what kind of question is that? What must I do now? — that is what the tragic hero asks, that is the painful question. He must do something. To have the hero fall across the dynamite switch because he is wounded permits the final destruction to arise not out of the agony of choice but out of mere physical circumstance. What had begun as a drama of character ends unsatisfactorily with some misty melodramatic statement about Chance and the Ironies of Life.

    Of course, in 1957 Roth was also busy writing fiction, including the stories that would be collected in Goodbye, Columbus and that would make of him a National Book Award winner at 26. That brash young talent is on display in a few of his reviews. In his coverage of the televised Miss America pageant, for instance, he wanders off into a remembrance of his boyhood barber, a “sixty-year-old Turkish Jew who had preached hedonism to me long before he’d begun to shave my sideburns; his admiration for his adopted country was limited for the most part to its long-legged women.” The old barber would be right at home in Roth’s early stories — a friend of “Epstein,” maybe, or Ozzie’s neighbor in “The Conversion of the Jews.”

    Special mention also goes to Roth’s review of 20th Century-Fox’s The Sun Also Rises, which he delivers in the style of Hemingway and in the form of a conversation between himself and a “street-walker” who he meets outside the theater. It ends:

    We left it at that.

    Finally she looked up. “I hear they are filming A Farewell to Arms,” she said.

    “I know.”

    “It will have Rock Hudson,” she looked up hopefully; it was a drunk’s kind of hope. “Maybe it will be better?”

    Someone came into the bar and from across the street I could hear silver clinking on the box office window.

    “Yes,” I said, “isn’t it pretty to think so.”

    As far as I know, Roth’s reviews have never been collected. I had to scour through a few rolls of microfilm to find them all. They’re well worth the effort, I’d say. Kauffman, by the way, posted his review of The Human Stain a few days ago and concludes:

    Thus The Human Stain, for all its page-by-page rewards, is a smaller book internally than most of Roth’s work. It is no compliment to the art of film to say that the book’s quasi-mechanical structure, plus that social issue, recommended it for adaptation, but I’d guess that this was what happened. These facts also explain why the film’s shortcomings are not all Meyer’s: most of them are in the novel.

  • Going Digital

    Mike, do you feel that these days you can actually do bolder things on television than you can in film?

    Nichols: I do, yes. It has to do with HBO, it’s as simple as that. We love HBO and we love the freedom that there is on HBO, and the power. And what is that power? It’s economic. You know, we’re run by market forces—the fact that an outfit can make a billion dollars a year just sitting there collecting its subscriptions. It’s an economic basis that affords us this freedom.

    HBO’s economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America. In preparation for the big premiere, I called my cable provider last week to find out how much it would cost to add just HBO to my basic service package. “You’re new monthly bill will be $61.50,” the surprisingly helpful saleswoman told me. “Or,” she paused, tying her carrot to the stick, “for just a few dollars more, we can upgrade you to digital cable and throw in the full compliment of HBO/Showtime channels, plus an additional tier of your choice.”

    So, of course, I now have digital cable.

  • Carney on Minnie and Moskowitz

    Carney on Minnie and Moskowitz

    The greatest face in film history? Ray Carney on John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz:

    Cassavetes won’t let a viewer expand within a romantic moment. No scene, interaction, or shot gives us a simple emotion. If a scene has romance in it, it is invariably crossed with anxiety or pain. If there is seriousness, it is mixed-up with wacky comedy. If one character is feeling one thing, another is feeling something different. Even the lovely meditative interlude in which Minnie talks to Florence about her dreams and desires makes clear that Florence doesn’t understand a word she is saying. While Minnie is waxing poetic, Florence is sitting there bewildered and half-soused. Every perspective is tangled up with contradictory ones. No imaginative relationship—of character to character or viewer to character—is uncompromised or unchallenged. . . .

    The secret of Cassavetes’ art is that it is fundamentally an act of empathy. We are not asked to stand outside and judge (as in an Altman film), but to go inside and understand. We can’t hold ourselves above the characters, untouched by them, superior to them. Cassavetes opens trap doors into their consciousnesses, so that they are given the chance to explain themselves and justify their actions. We are forced to see things from their perspectives, feeling what they feel. No one is generic, a type; everyone is a unique individual. Morgan Morgan (played by Tim Carey), odd duck that he is, touches us with his bonhomie and lame attempts at humor. Florence’s sad loneliness and confession of sexual frustration move her beyond being simply comical. We can’t merely laugh at any of Cassavetes’ characters; we are forced to care.

  • Lost in Translation (2003)

    Lost in Translation (2003)

    Jonathon Rosenbaum on Lost in Translation:

    Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I’m not sure she accomplishes anything else.

    I like that Rosenbaum threw “not sure” into that last sentence, as if he’s still mulling over his reaction. I feel the same way.  It’s that rarest of finds: an American film that is invested enough in its characters to reveal them slowly, patiently to the audience. For instance, in the third act of the film, when most writer/directors would send their leads into an impassioned and cliche-ridden argument, Coppola sits Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson on opposite sides of a table and films them from a distance. It’s an awkward moment — uncomfortable and tense and recognizably real. I loved it. Their final embrace is also brilliantly staged.

    But, as I watched Lost in Translation, I kept thinking of two other films, and it suffered for the (admittedly unfair) comparison. Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women also depicts the modern Asian metropolis as a storehouse of stuff — of manufactured goods marketed, packaged, and photographed with the glossy hipness of a five-page spread in Architectural Digest — but Hou’s film grounds that critique in a particular cultural and historic context. Like a few others, I was annoyed by the outsider-looking-in-and-laughing easy jokes that give Lost in Translation‘s American audiences something to mock but too little to admire. Charlotte’s solitary walks through a temple and a flower-arranging class do offer something of a counter-balance. I guess I’m just ultra-sensitive to anything that smacks of American xenophobia these days.

    More often, though, I was thinking of Tsai Ming-Liang, and of his film, The Hole, in particular. Like Lost in Translation, The Hole is about the desperate desire for communion in an alienating environment, told as an unlikely “love” story. Tsai and Coppola share an interest in elliptical editing, but their styles are quite different. Lost in Translation is composed of brief episodes — short takes of beautifully composed images — while Tsai tends to leave his camera running for minutes at a time. What can I say? I prefer the latter, and at times I sensed that Coppola does to. We often see Charlotte and Bob alone in their rooms, bored and lonely, but we aren’t forced to experience it with them. The most impressive shots, I thought, were of Charlotte pressed against her hotel window, looking over the Tokyo sprawl. It’s a familiar image to Tsai’s fans (is Coppola one?). At times, I wish we could have stayed there longer with her and come to know her better.

    Think I’m going to have to pick up the soundtrack next time I’m out. Great stuff from Air, Kevin Shields, My Bloody Valentine, and The Jesus & Mary Chain.

  • Bresson at the Film Forum

    So I wonder if there’s any chance, any chance at all, of Au Hasard Balthazar making a stop in Knoxville. I’ve seen this film only twice, both times on a duped VHS tape that a friend mailed to me from California, but it’s securely in my Top 20 favorite films. I sometimes fantasize about writing a book about “Christian film aesthetics,” whatever that means. It would/will focus on the usual suspects: Bazin, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Dreyer, and, of course, Bresson. If there is, in fact, such thing as a Christian aesthetics in the cinema, then Balthazar must be the model.

    God, as ever in the work of legendary filmmaker Bresson, is in the details: the elliptical editing, with its abrupt cuts, off-screen space, and as much focus on the hands of the nonpro cast as on their faces; sound design alternating between classical music and natural sounds; the accumulation of cruelties endured by Marie and Balthazar; and the religious symbolism, from baptism to martyrdom — with the silent Balthazar transformed into a patient, long-suffering saint (“the most sublime cinematic passage I know.” – Hoberman). In a body of work known for its purity and transcendence, Balthazar is perhaps the most wrenching of Bresson’s visions.

    Hmmmmm . . . Roundtrip from Knoxville to LaGuardia is only $219. Tempting. Very tempting.

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.

  • More from Toronto

    In his on-going reportage from the Toronto film festival, J. Robert Parks has posted a full-length review of Tsai’s Good Bye, Dragon Inn. Especially given the lukewarm response to Twentynine Palms, this has now officially become my most highly-anticipated film of the year. Parks offers ample spoilers from the film, but anyone who watches Tsai for his plots has already missed the point. This bit from the review has left me down-right giddy with anticipation:

    And this brings us to Tsai’s central point: that one type of character is just as worthy as another type and, therefore, one type of story is just as worthy as another. In that, Good Bye, Dragon Inn becomes a powerful defense for the kind of movies Tsai makes, films in which marginalized characters struggle with apparently banal difficulties. They’re not superheroes, they’re not martial artists, they’re not saving the world. And yet they are worthy of our attention. In East Asian cinema, which has become dominated by the martial arts and horror genres, this is an incredibly bold assertion.

  • Notes from the Festivals

    David Hudson’s always excellent film blog at GreenCine is a great one-stop resource for links to news from Toronto and Venice. Some early blurbs that have caught my attention:

    Dumont’s previous films, set in the French countryside, worked the social into the individual, creating desperation and isolation and jealousy to drive his characters. Here, they are simply abstractions in an abstract landscape, driving themselves on pure sensation (they are less in love than addicted to sex) and awaiting punishment from a malevolent God in the form of blunt and brutal violence that springs out of nowhere — a climax that becomes an act of auteur masturbation.
    — Sean Axmaker on Twentynine Palms

    Some stirring moments of drama. But they don’t add up to a satisfying whole.
    — ScreenDaily on The Human Stain (requires subscription)

    JRobert will also soon begin posting reports from Toronto at Film Journey. He has already posted his itinerary, which has left me more than a wee bit jealous. Through the DVDBeaver listserv, I’ve “met” several fine folks who live in or around Toronto. One of these years, I’m going to have to camp out in their living rooms and experience this thing first-hand.

  • From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1996)

    Dir. by Mark Rappaport

    Inspired by my recent wanderings through Ray Carney’s Website, I rented Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg and watched it twice this weekend. Here, Rappaport — who Carney calls “a geographer of our fantasies, dreams, and obsessions” — splices together news footage, film clips, and original video, creating a documentary-ish collage that transforms Seberg’s life into a meditation on misogyny, the Hollywood star machine, and the morality of spectatorship. He also manages to chart America’s journey from Eisenhower-era consensus through the rise and fall of the New Left, and does it all with wit and authority and insight. Quite a feat for a 95 minute film.

    Journals is built around the performance of Mary Beth Hurt, who plays Seberg from beyond the grave. The actress stares directly into the camera — which is only appropriate for someone standing in for the star of Godard’s Breathless — and recounts her life in the first person: born in 1938 in America’s heartland, discovered in Otto Preminger’s nationwide talent search for his adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, launched to international stardom by Godard, abused by a trio of husbands, excoriated for her involvement with the Black Panthers, ignored in a series of forgettable roles, dead from suicide at the age of 40.

    Rappaport follows this line in mostly chronological order, using Seberg’s major film roles as jumping off points. For instance, when discussing the artistic and commercial failings of Saint Joan, he wanders off through the lives of Falconetti, Ingrid Bergman, and Alida Valli — all leading ladies who carried the “curse” of playing Joan of Arc. It’s a fascinating conceit — a kind of associative editing that, in a sense, hyperlinks the various threads of film history and, in the process, forces us to acknowledge the strangeness of narrative and symbolic archetypes. Why do we take such pleasure from watching a noble young woman burned before us? Or, as Rappaport asks when discussing Seberg’s most interesting role — her lead in Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) — why must men (the writers, producers, and directors) always equate female madness with aberrant sexuality?

    Journals is at its best, I think, when Rappaport intertwines the lives and loves of Seberg, Jane Fonda, and Vanessa Redgrave. All are of the same age, all made films directed by their husbands (another of the film’s more interesting concerns), and all participated actively in radical political movements. Their stories ended quite differently, though. Redgrave retreated to the stage and to small, innocuous film roles. The public, Hurt’s Seberg tells us, doesn’t care to watch its young beauties grow old on screen. Fonda exploited her sexualized Barbarella persona by stretching and gyrating her way through a series of popular workout videos that earned her millions. My favorite of Hurt’s lines is when she mentions that in 1988, in order to stave off bad publicity, Fonda apologized to veterans groups for her Vietnam-era activities, but never, as far as Hurt could remember, apologized to feminists for being a bimbo.

    Seberg’s life ended in 1978, when she finally succeeded after a series of failed suicide attempts. The reasons for her depression are complicated, the film shows us — her lopsided marriage to Romain Gary, a lifetime spent “doing what she was told,” the death of her daughter, and the hounding pressures exerted on her by both Hoover’s F.B.I. and the popular press. But, ultimately, we’re left to wonder about the destructive effects of a life lived on screen. A life of being looked at. At one point, Rappaport draws a line from the Kuleshov effect to Breathless to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name — or, from Russian Formalism to the first Modern cinema to Reagan-era machismo. Seberg is stuck there in the middle. Her blind stare into the camera is “enigmatic” and “sphinx-like,” or so the male reviewers have said, and all I can do is project my own desires onto her beautiful, beautiful face. The story of her life.

    I look forward to sharing Rappaport’s film with students who bristle at the word “feminism,” because Journals is not the least bit preachy — in fact, it offers few pat answers at all — but it makes feminist concerns immediate and (I hesitate to use the word) entertaining. Quite a feat.

  • A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

    A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

    Dir. by John Cassavetes

    It took me three tries to make it through John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. I wasn’t bored by the film; I was in agony. Gena Rowlands’s performance as Mabel Longhetti, a blue collar housewife collapsing under the weight of mental illness, is the single most painful experience of my film-watching life. Cassavetes doesn’t make it easy for us. His brand of cinema verite forces us to look on helplessly, passively, as if we were just a few more strangers in Mabel’s life, a few more strangers who refuse to stand up for her. He uses static medium shots to sit us down at the Longhetti’s large, loud dinner table, then denies us an escape route when the tension builds. These moments are balanced with equally painful close-ups that bring us into intimate contact with Mabel, someone with whom such intimacy is a constant threat and danger.

    Peter Falk plays Mabel’s husband, Nick, an abusive bastard who, though occasionally capable of stealing our sympathy, is one of the screen’s most loathsome villains. In the final act of the film — an hour-long scene that takes place on the evening of Mabel’s return from a six-month stay in a sanitarium — the depths of Nick’s depravity and the extent to which he has contributed to Mabel’s instability are revealed in a series of devastating sequences that play out in real time. I found myself literally squirming in my seat, gasping aloud and wiping away tears. Because of that I just can’t accept Roger Ebert’s take on the final image: “Only by the end of the film is it quietly made clear that Nick is about as crazy as his wife is, and that in a desperate way their two madnesses make a nice fit.” Calling that fit “nice” is a disgrace. I don’t get it.

    As he would be the first to point out, Ray Carney is the authority on and champion of John Cassavetes’s films. A professor of film and American studies at Boston University and director of the film studies program there, Carney is best known for being something of a polemicist and provocateur (and a damn fine film critic, to boot). I like to browse through his impressive Website when I’m feeling pessimistic about the current state of academia. Doing so certainly doesn’t cure me of my condition, but I find it strangely comforting to read such articulate and well-informed rants on the subject. It also helps that the guy seems to lack any kind of internal censor. Carney doesn’t pull punches, and it’s damn refreshing.

    In “‘A herd of Independent Minds’: Or, Intellectuals Are the Last to Know,” Carney sits down with an unnamed interviewer and skewers contemporary film criticism, Hollywood, the intellectual influence of the New York Times, academic biases against film art, and Citizen Kane. God bless him. The whole piece is worth a read (as is much of the other writing collected at his site), but I think Carney is at his best when he talks about the incestuous relationship between art, academia, and the cultural forces that shape critical opinion.

    Journalists and the things they write about have become part of the celebrity culture, which means that once someone or something appears in The New York Times or The New Yorker, he, she, or it is taken seriously. If someone’s name appears in the New York Times or The New Yorker a certain number of times, that’s all that it takes to constitute importance. And the people who appear in The New York Times or The New Yorker the most are journalists. So they are taken the most seriously. They become the cultural definition of what it is to be a thinker. If a journalist is merely a bit clever verbally and shows up on the breakfast table long enough, most academics and intellectuals mistake him or her for a thinker. No one ever asks if you are really important. Are you really smart? . . .

    My understanding of being an intellectual is that it is to be given a unique opportunity to stand just a little outside our culture’s system of hype and publicity. It is to be someone who refuses to be pulled into the muddy undertow of advertising, journalistic sensationalism and celebrity worship. While more or less everyone else is paid to sell something, the academic is paid to be independent. Or not paid. But is independent anyway. But what has happened in our culture is the opposite. At least in film, the intellectuals line up to sell out to the culture’s values. And for the people giving out the grants and prizes, the celebrity tail wags the intellectual dog. Our universities are no different.

    But academics, obviously, aren’t the only people getting wagged by that celebrity tail.

    This applies to every group. What is it Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake? “We wipe our glosses with what we know.” For literary critics, a movie is good if it has clever dialogue or is a faithful adaptation. It’s no different from why multiculturalists judge a film in terms of how many minority characters are in it or what their income level is, why Jewish viewers like Schindler’s List, World War II vets like Saving Private Ryan, teenage girls like Titanic, and teenage boys like The Matrix. It’s identity politics. People enjoy seeing themselves and their own views represented — not their real selves and views of course, but a flattering, idealized version of them. It’s not a terribly sophisticated view of what makes great art. Yet how many times do you hear something like “Holocaust survivors said that Spielberg’s movie was accurate” invoked as proof that Schindler’s List is a great movie?

    Carney offers some advice for film-viewers — tips and tricks that he’s learned over the years as he’s tried to empower young film students and complacent professors alike:

    I do a lot of things to lever them out of their old ways of knowing — including deliberately destroying a lot of the pleasure of the screening, by calling things out during it, or stopping the film at a climactic moment and asking questions about it—so that they can’t just sit back and relax and watch the movie. I am reprogramming their brains, teaching them new sets of responses, new things to look and listen for. Sometimes I talk all the way through a film to prevent them from “dropping into it” even for a minute. I have to play a lot of mind games and sprinkle a lot of fairy dust to keep them motivated. Students really have to put themselves in my hands, and there may be a certain amount of resistance for the first couple months, but that too becomes part of the learning process—a lesson in how we resist change and hold onto past viewing habits. But the best ones stay with it because as the challenges get greater, the trust and personal bond grows. I can’t do any of that when I am showing the film to a professor. The relationship is entirely different. With twenty-year-olds who are malleable and open to new experiences it’s not that hard to orchestrate the changes, but for someone older and more set in their ways it’s much less likely to happen.

  • Great Directors: Tsai Ming-liang

    Great Directors: Tsai Ming-liang

    This essay was orignally published at Senses of Cinema.

    – – –

    The River (1997), Tsai Ming-liang’s third feature-length film, opens with a static shot of a vacant, two-way escalator. After twenty seconds or so of silence—the diegetic drone of the escalators is the only sound we hear—a young woman begins her descent down the left side as a young man climbs to the right. They share an unexpected glimpse of recognition in passing, then turn toward each other, their bodies still being pushed in opposite directions. It’s a paradigmatic instance of Tsai’s storytelling: a nearly wordless exchange between two souls who are, paradoxically, isolated among Taipei’s six million inhabitants and drawn together/pulled apart by its contemporary, technological landscape. That the woman, upon reaching the lower level, immediately turns and ascends back to where her old friend awaits, suggests the possibility of grace—even if fleeting—that bleeds through so much of Tsai’s otherwise bleak and alienating vision. In his world of water-soaked apartments, anonymous sexual encounters, mysterious and catastrophic disease, and desperate loneliness, Tsai clutches tightly to a strange and joyful faith in the potential for genuine human communion, a communion that is rare indeed but occasionally worthy of the effort.

    Born and raised in Kuching, Malaysia, Tsai Ming-liang was introduced to movies by his grandparents, who often took him to screenings of popular films from China, Taiwan, India, Hong Kong, America, and the Philippines at any of the dozen or so cinemas that populated their small, quiet town. The son of a farmer who also operated a stall in the city center, Tsai speaks fondly of his relatively carefree childhood. “The main benefit I got from having lived there, in Kuching, for that period” he has said, “was the very slow pace of life, giving me time to develop my interests and enjoy myself.” (1) The analogies here to Tsai’s distinctive film style and narrative concerns are too rich to ignore. Even by the standards of his New Taiwanese Cinema contemporaries, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang, Tsai’s films are, as some would say, deliberately paced. Cutting together long takes, often of static medium and long shots, he unabashedly requires each viewer to slow down and patiently experience another’s life, thereby avoiding the dictatorial imposition of classical continuity editing that would lead inevitably, in the words of Andrei Tarkovsky, to “a facile interpretation of life’s complexities.” (2) Instead, Tsai’s camera lingers near his subjects in an almost documentary fashion, observing their behavior with relative objectivity, just as the director himself came of age freely observing and admiring the slow movements of Malaysian life.

    At twenty, after finishing high school and becoming “a bit of a gigolo”, Tsai left Kuching at his father’s prodding and resettled in Taiwan, where he entered Taipei’s Chinese Culture University to study film and drama. (3) There, he was first exposed to European cinema and, specifically, to auteurs such as Truffaut, Fassbinder, Bresson, and Antonioni, the four filmmakers to whom Tsai is most often compared. “I think European films are closer to me because they are about modern life and ordinary, modern men,” Tsai told Nanouk Leopold. “And I have the idea they are more realistic, true to life.” (4) Although cataloguing their particular influences might be a tad reductive, the contributions of each director to Tsai’s style is clear: Truffaut’s sweet humanism; Fassbinder’s loyal troupe of collaborators, along with his gender and sexual preoccupations; Bresson’s precise attention to the bodies of his non-professional actors; Antonioni’s alienating urban landscapes. For Tsai, the films of the Nouvelle Vague and the New German Cinema, in particular, were convincing evidence of film’s potential as a vehicle for personal expression. He emerged from that experience with a new enthusiasm for the film director as a guiding and influential artistic voice.

    Tsai graduated from the university in 1982, an interesting moment in Taiwan’s recent history. Three years after America first enacted the Taiwan Relations Act—which formally recognized the People’s Republic of China and severed official diplomatic ties with Taiwan—but five years before the decades of marshal law were finally brought to an end, Taiwan was in a state of flux, moving slowly but progressively toward democratization (which it would finally achieve fully in 1996 with the election of President Lee Teng-hui). For Taiwan’s emerging generation of artists and filmmakers, that social and political flux resulted in greater access to alternate sources of financing and a renaissance of independent filmmaking. Tsai immediately began work in the theater, where he staged four original plays, including A Wardrobe in the Room (1983), a one-person show in which Tsai himself starred. The drama concerns a young man who voluntarily isolates himself from the city that surrounds him, a motif that would later come to dominate Tsai’s films. He also busied himself by writing screenplays for film and television, work that led to his first significant experiences behind the camera.

    Between 1989 and 1991, Tsai wrote ten teleplays, eight of which he also directed, either in whole or in part (this according to the appendix of Tsai Ming-liang, published by Editions Dis Voir in 1999, the only existing book-length study of the director). Tsai now views that period as a fundamental apprenticeship during which he found his voice as a director. There, for instance, he first discovered the remarkable tensions created by mixing professional actors with amateurs, and there he also first explored the use of documentary technique in narrative films. Unfortunately, Western audiences have had precious few opportunities to see Tsai’s early work. Only two of the television films were included in a recent touring retrospective (2002). Chris Fujiwara has described the first, All the Corners of the World (1989), as “a study of a family of movie-ticket scalpers [that] provides early drafts of images and situations that will recur in Tsai’s films, including a roller-rink scene, motorbike vandalism, an elevator ride in a love hotel, and a mannequin floating in water.” (5) The other, Boys (1991), is most notable for introducing the talents of Lee Kang-sheng (aka Hsiao-kang), who has gone on to star in each of Tsai’s features.

    Along with the various teleplays, Tsai was also at work on the script for his first feature, Rebels of the Neon God (1992), which he describes as an attempt to “make a feature that was even more documentary, even more real, about everyday life in Taipei.” (6) The story of a disenchanted youth (Lee) who drops out of school after becoming obsessed with a local petty criminal (played by Chen Chao-jung), Rebels introduces what have since become the hallmarks of Tsai’s style: a preoccupation with the fractured nuclear family, which is explored onscreen by Lee, Miao Tien as his father, and Lu Hsiao-ling as his mother, all of whom return in nearly identical roles in The River and What Time Is It There? (2001); an attention to the rootless nihilism of Taipei’s youth; the juxtaposition of contemporary mores and traditional Eastern religion, most often enacted in the mother’s ceremonial adherence to Buddhist ritual; an interest in sex as an immediate but ultimately unsatisfying act of catharsis; and a symbolic obsession with water.

    Rebels also exemplifies Tsai’s distinctive approach to narrative, which deliberately exploits and subverts traditional notions of dramatic tension. In one sequence, for instance, Lee trails Chen and his partner-in-crime into an arcade, where the two young thieves force open video games to steal their motherboards. When the boys complete their job and escape from the arcade, Lee is left alone, locked in for the night, waiting to be discovered. Tsai employs standard continuity editing here—cross-cutting from a shot of Lee asleep on the arcade floor to another of a security guard arriving for duty—but he then elides the expected confrontation and deflates the scene’s tension by cutting to a shot of Lee walking safely down a Taipei street. Later, we see Lee alone in his bedroom, posed with a handgun in his outstretched arms. But, again, the expected violence never materializes, or at least not as Tsai had led us to imagine it. Instead, like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, his films turn viewers into self-conscious observers of strange, complex behavior—less stereotypically cinematic, more unpredictably human.

    In Vive l’amour (1994), Tsai’s follow-up, Lee and Chen return, this time as street vendors who are drawn together by a vacant, upscale apartment and the young realtor, May Lin (played by Yang Kuei-mei, another of Tsai’s regulars), who fails repeatedly in her attempts to rent it. The film ends with two stunning sequences that illustrate all that makes Tsai’s vision so fascinating. In the penultimate scene, Hsiao-kang crawls into bed with Ah-jung (Chen), who is sleeping soundly. Tsai’s camera lingers on the two men for several minutes, forcing us to watch—trapped in a moment of almost Hitchcockian suspense—as Hsiao-kang leans closer and closer, finally kissing the other on the mouth without waking him. It’s a remarkable performance. Lee’s face is written with conflicted emotion: curiosity, terror, longing, shame, joy. Tsai then cuts to his heroine, who is now walking quickly and alone through a park that is muddied by construction. She wants only to put some distance between herself and Ah-jung’s bed, from which she has recently escaped quietly after another night of anonymous sex. May Lin finally rests at an outdoor amphitheater, where she sits and begins to cry. Typical of the director’s style, Tsai frames her in a medium close-up, then simply allows the camera to run. The shot lasts for five and a half minutes, during which May Lin struggles to find composure. But she is able to do so only temporarily before surrendering, again and again, to the sobs. As Dennis Lim has said of the scene, Tsai fades to black “just as you’ve convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.” (7)

    The River is Tsai’s bleakest film and also his most explicitly transgressive. After the escalator scene described above, Hsiao-kang accompanies the young woman to the set of a movie on which she is working, where he volunteers to float lifelessly in the Tanshui river, imitating a corpse. The remainder of the film concerns his and his family’s attempts to cure him of a mysterious neck pain that becomes progressively debilitating in the weeks that follow his swim. As in The Hole (1997), in which Taipei is plagued by a millennial health epidemic, here Tsai explores the emotional and psychological resonances of an inexplicable pain that carries both symbolic and corporal weight. Lee’s neck condition acts, first, as a metonymic manifestation of other ails, chief among them the collapse of the family, which in many of Tsai’s films stands in as a microcosm of contemporary society. The River dissects the traditional nuclear family with brutal frankness, culminating in a complex and difficult, but undeniably brilliant scene that shocks viewers into confronting the consequences of dishonest living, failed communication, and psychic alienation.

    But Tsai refuses to slip completely into allegory here, denying us the safety of symbolic distance. Lee’s pain, instead, is always present, always excruciatingly real. In that sense, Tsai’s camera is like the Naturalist’s pen—like Flaubert’s and Zola’s—observing (almost clinically) bodies, faces, and superficial behaviors in an attempt to explain something of the human experience. In Vive l’amour Tsai first began “researching” his characters in isolation, a conceit that he develops further in The River before taking it to extreme lengths in The Hole. “That’s why I like filming bodies in these solitary situations so much,” he has said, “because I think that a person’s body only really belongs to them when they are alone.” (8) Thus, Tsai’s films are populated with shots of the mundane rituals of life—isolated characters eating, pissing, watching television, masturbating, smoking, working, mopping up spills, crying. At one point in The River, Lee sits alone on a hallway bench, where he is finally overcome by the burdens of pain. As in the final shot of Vive l’amour, we are left to watch helplessly as he convulses and, in exasperation, rocks his head into the wall behind him. Here and elsewhere, Lee is the ideal subject for Tsai’s experiments. His slow movements and measured expressions make him something of a Tarkovskyan figure, one who is “outwardly static, but inwardly charged with energy by an overriding passion.” (9)

    Lee’s body is also on remarkable display in The Hole, in which he and Yang Kuei-mei perform a cinematic dance—quite literally in places—that blends slapstick comedy with profound pathos. Part of the seven-film “2000 Seen By…” series, The Hole marked Tsai’s return to features after the 1995 documentary, My New Friends, a portrait of two HIV-positive men. Perhaps reflecting that documentary experience, The Hole is set in the final days of 1999, when an enigmatic virus forces the government of Taiwan to quarantine large sections of Taipei. Lee and Yang remain, however, and their lives become entwined after a utility worker drills a hole through the floor that separates their apartments. In many ways, The Hole marks a significant departure from the films that preceded it. While Tsai’s central thematic concern (urban alienation) and his palette of symbols (water, in particular) remain on prominent display, The Hole offers portents of grace and promise that are only hinted at in his previous work. Tsai deviates most radically here in his use of fantasy-fueled musical dance sequences that meld nostalgia—harkening back to the popular Hong Kong films of his youth—with playful irreverence. Typically, Tsai eschews musical scores so as to not “shatter the reality” of his cinematic worlds. (10) The Hole, however, has only one foot in reality from the outset; the other is firmly planted in Yang’s and Lee’s projected desires (which, by the way, are awfully fun to watch).

    The Hole is also a significant departure for Tsai in that the film’s simple plot—two neighbors pine away in isolation, perpetually separated by an artificial barrier—necessarily eliminates any possibility of the two leads having sex. Sex is an appropriately complicated issue in all of Tsai’s other films, which prominently feature impersonal and unfulfilling sexual encounters. Dennis Lim suggests that, in comparison with the films of his more explicitly political Taiwanese contemporaries, Tsai’s are more concerned with “personal fumblings—often stemming from romantic longing and sexual confusion.” That confusion becomes manifest in frequent one night stands, visits to gay saunas, extramarital affairs, the mimicking of pornography (which plays like a training video in the background of several scenes), and, at its most extreme, incest. In Tsai’s fourth film, however, “the hole” itself, standing as it does between Yang and Lee, becomes that obscure object of desire (and surely it doesn’t require a Freudian analyst to remark on the metaphoric implications of that hole). The film’s penultimate sequence might be the most extraordinary of Tsai’s career. In a static long shot, we see Yang crumpled on the floor of her apartment, exhausted and water-logged. From just beyond the top edge of the frame, Lee’s arm extends down toward her. She notices and reaches for it; they make contact, and he pulls her up, presumably into his life. Such a simple, fairy tale-like image, but, especially given the context of his otherwise dystopian vision, that moment of communion breathes unexpected optimism and life into Tsai’s oeuvre.

    In What Time Is It There?, Tsai’s most recent feature, that promise remains, though tempered somewhat by the pains of tragedy and loss. The film is, in many ways, the logical culmination of his career thus far. Lee returns here as a Taipei watch vendor who is mourning the sudden death of his father (Miao Tien). In an early scene, Shiang-chyi (Chen Shiang-chyi), a beautiful young woman preparing for a trip to Paris, convinces Hsiao-kang to sell his own watch to her. Their brief encounter inspires in him a sense of longing, which he acts upon by systematically resetting clocks to Paris time and by watching, again and again, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). While Hsiao-kang pines away in Taiwan, Shiang-chyi wanders through Parisian cafes and Metro stations, adrift in the rituals of loneliness: listening silently to the late-night sounds of an upstairs neighbor, longing for contact with random strangers. To this strange pairing, Tsai adds Hsiao-kang’s mother (again Lu Hsiao-ling, though now using the name Lu Yi-ching), a woman paralyzed by grief who also seems to find relief only through ritual, both religious and domestic.

    In one of the film’s most touching scenes, the mother dresses formally for a private dinner, accompanied only by her husband’s empty chair at the table. Like Hitchcock’s “Miss Lonelyhearts”, she raises a toast to her imagined companion before breaking into tears. It’s another trademark Tsai moment: his camera again remains static throughout the long take, framing his subject in a medium long shot; the actress works alone in silence, her movements measured and deliberate. The tendency of most critics has been to reduce these signature scenes to simple meditations on Modernist dismay, but doing so too easily dismisses the honor and wonder of mourning. Hsiao-kang’s mother is not a desperate individual adrift in an irrational, alienating world (or some such cliché); instead, she is like so many of us, one who has obviously known love and companionship and now, suddenly, must make sense of loss. Tsai’s style, which is often rightfully compared to the silent cinema, frees us to experience the full brunt of attendant emotions: agony, nostalgia, despair, desire, hope. Our efforts are rewarded in full in the closing moments of the film—the most transcendent of Tsai’s career, thanks in part to Benoit Delhomme’s stunning photography and Miao Tien’s remarkable face—when that same strange beauty returns and What Time Is It There? transforms unexpectedly into a romantic ghost story and an ode to eternal love.

    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.

    Endnotes

    1. Danièle Rivière, “Scouting: An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang”, Tsai Ming-liang, Paris, Dis Voir, 1999, p. 79
    2. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, New York, Knopf, 1987, p. 20
    3. Rivière, p. 81
    4. Nanouk Leopold, “Confined Space – Interview with Tsai Ming liang”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 20, May–June 2002, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/tsai_interview.html
    5. Chris Fujiwara, “Of Space and Solitude”, The Phoenix, 21 February 2002, http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/documents/02164886.htm
    6. Rivière, p. 88
    7. Dennis Lim, “Tsai Ming-liang Opens the Floodgates”, The Village Voice, 25 June 2001, http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0126/lim.php
    8. Rivière, p. 103
    9. Tarkovsky, p. 17
    10. Rivière, p. 111
    11. Chuck Stephens, “Eastern Division Highlights”, Film Comment, January–February 2003, p. 68.
  • Ivan’s Childhood (1962)

    Ivan’s Childhood (1962)

    Dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky

    Images: Expressionistic camera angles, most notably in Ivan’s more terrifying dream sequences. Striking but occasionally heavy-handed symbolism, such as that beautiful cross amid the bombed-out landscape. Most memorable images are those that display Tarkovsky’s emerging aesthetic: the slow tracking shots through the birch forest, the close-ups of Ivan, the use of found footage, the final fantasy sequence.

    • • •

    A few summers ago, I had the rare opportunity to see Stanley Kubrick’s “lost” films at a special screening presented by the Mary Pickford Theater at the Library of Congress. His early shorts were interesting, of course, but the main attraction was his first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), a film that so embarrassed Kubrick in his later years that he reportedly collected and destroyed every print in circulation. According to the librarian who introduced the series, their print was discovered quite accidentally — a treasure among a collection of films shipped from a storehouse somewhere in Puerto Rico, as I recall. And much to Kubrick’s dismay, I’m sure.

    I’m hesitant to introduce a response to Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood with mention of Fear and Desire for fear that the latter’s reputation might somehow tarnish the former’s. So let me make this point clear: Tarkovsky’s is a much, much better film, a great film even. But both suffer the effects of youth. This can on occasion be a good thing, of course. There’s often a refreshing fearlessness in the works of those artists who are still seeking a voice, who haven’t yet learned the rules and mastered the fundamentals. But that fearlessness is often matched by a naïve worldview and reckless ambition. Actually, in Kubrick’s case, I would go so far as to call that ambition hubris, as he and co-screenwriter Howard Sackler — who, like Kubrick was only in his mid-20s at the time — set out on a shoestring budget to make a film about “the two greatest motivating forces in human history,” or some such nonsense. Set in a fictional, dreamlike landscape amid a fictional, dreamlike conflict, Fear and Desire is a war picture drowning in banal allegory, notable only for its notoriety and for the occasional startling image that hints at all that would come in Kubrick’s five-decade career. I’m glad I saw it. Once.

    That Ivan’s Childhood continues to impress and teach with repeat viewings is perhaps the best testament to the film’s lasting import. Like Fear and Desire, it is a war film that deliberately transcends many of the genre’s conventions, but it does so with a grace and humility that prevent Tarkovsky’s occasional missteps from spoiling the experience. Clearly, his aesthetic is still in gestation here. We’re offered brief glimpses of that mysterious poetic logic that informs his later work, but it is at times encumbered by weighty symbolism and Bergmanesque expressionism. Dare I say that Tarkovsky’s hand feels a bit heavy at times? If Paths of Glory is the first complete Kubrick film, the first to combine each of the particular stylistic devices and thematic obsessions that have come to define his status as an auteur, then I would argue that Andrei Rublev is our first taste of the full Tarkovsky, unburdened by another’s source material (he inherited the Ivan project from another director) and enlightened by palpable maturity, insight, and confidence.

    Ivan (Nikolai Burlyayev) is a hollow-eyed orphan who, after watching his parents and young sister killed, fashions himself as a spy on the eastern front. In the film’s opening act, Ivan trudges through a swamp under the glow of enemy tracers, carefully working his way from behind enemy lines to a Russian outpost where he’s greeted by Lieutenant Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), a commanding officer only a few years his senior. The twelve-year-old spy is exhausted and sickly but determined to deliver his intelligence to Colonel Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko), who, we eventually learn, has become something of a father figure to Ivan. Gryaznov and Captain Kholin (Valentin Zubkov) conspire to secret Ivan away to a military academy, but the young soldier proves too stubborn and determined. He runs away, then, after being discovered hiding amid the desolate, bombed-out landscape, convinces his friends and superiors of his unique value to the cause. The remainder of the film documents the making of preparations for Ivan’s subsequent mission back into Nazi territory.

    As with all of Tarkovsky’s work, a simple plot summary makes for an insufficient record of the film itself. Although it is the director’s most traditionally narrative-driven feature, Ivan’s Childhood is less concerned with war’s stories than with war’s human experiences and its aftermath: physical, emotional, and spiritual. At the risk of sounding pedantic, I would argue that, in this film, Tarkovsky forsakes the terrain of the traditional battlefield in order to more fully explore that of the embattled body. In an early scene, for instance, we watch as Ivan strips naked and bathes in a small metal drum. It’s a stunning image — Burlyayev, the young actor, is a pathetic, emaciated mess of ribs and knees and shoulders — an image that strips away the naïve romanticism that tends to accompany the genre. Tarkovsky’s camera exposes both Ivan and Lieutenant Galtsev not as the manly war heroes who they (and most war films) would imagine themselves to be, but as children without options.

    When Galtsev later says of the young spy, “A war is no place for children,” his words are all the more poignant and absurd for coming from this teenaged officer’s mouth. He uses a similar line — “War is a man’s business” — after deciding to send Masha (Valentina Malyavina), a young nurse, home from the front. But, again, the line falls flat. It’s a false, empty performance of bravado, a deflation and deconstruction of the countless odes to heroic sacrifice that inform our stories of war — epic, mythological, literary, and cinematic. By treating such conventions truthfully and with seriousness, Tarkovsky manages to expose the dehumanization of war without slipping into cynicism or satire. (Would that an American filmmaker could avoid the same trap today.) The film’s final shot of Galtsev is also one of its most memorable. A few years older and with the war now behind him, Galtsev is quite literally scarred by his experience. But the actor’s young face refuses to lend the image the symbolic weight we might expect from the coda of a war film. He is not a wizened, toughened officer — a “man” who has proven his mettle in the manliest of arenas. Instead, like Ivan, he remains a boy, but one carrying tragic wounds.

    Throughout the film, Tarkovsky makes remarkable use of close-ups of his actors’ faces (most notably, the final shots of Ivan) as a traditional technique for blurring the boundaries between objective and subjective experience. That blurring is critical to the success of this film, which is as much a psychological profile as it is a biography or war picture. We are offered access to Ivan’s subjectivity, in particular, through a series of dream sequences — some idyllic, others terrifying. But, really, the entire film is so closely bound to his perspective that it plays, with only a few notable exceptions, like Ivan’s psychic projection. Tarkovsky’s tack works quite successfully, for the most part. In Sculpting in Time, he writes:

    in film, every time, the first essential in any plastic composition, its necessary and final criterion, is whether it is true to life, specific and factual; that is what makes it unique. By contrast, symbols are born, and readily pass into general use to become clichés, when an author hits upon a particular plastic composition, ties it in with some mysterious turn of thought of his own, loads it with extraneous meaning.

    Ivan’s Childhood, I think, offers examples of both. There are, surprisingly for Tarkovsky, occasional missteps into symbolism — that beautiful but strangely empty image of a cross on the battlefield, for instance, or the cock-eyed camera angles that compose Ivan’s nightmares and that would feel more at home in Wild Strawberries than in Rublev. More often, though, the director manages to create moments that could only be described as Tarkovskyan — those amazing moments that make him one of the few geniuses of film. He’s at his finest in a sequence involving Masha and Captain Kholin, who pursues the nurse into a thick forest of birch trees. Tarkovsky’s camera tracks their movements at a distance before joining them, finally, in a strange, low-angle embrace over a small trench. The scene achieves his artistic ideal:

    A true artistic image gives the beholder a simultaneous experience of the most complex, contradictory, sometimes even mutually exclusive feelings.

    Kholin’s and Masha’s encounter is a desperate act of human contact, but it’s also vaguely degrading; it’s a moment of near transcendent delight, but it’s one that feels debased and compromised. I can’t make sense of it, really, though I feel compelled to, which is probably why Ivan’s Childhood is one of the few war films that I return to with any frequency. That complexity of emotions and motivations should always form the foundations of our war stories, or we’ll make the mistake of flattening the world, reducing its rich textures and varied peoples to stark black and white.

  • Children of Heaven (1997)

    Children of Heaven (1997)

    As an antidote to the American media, lately I’ve been spending my precious down time with films from the Middle East. Quick tangent: Long Pauses attracts an odd assortment of readers — undergraduates looking for “Benito Cereno” papers to steal, disenfranchised Christians seeking fellow travelers, and film buffs, mostly. For those of you not in the latter group, let me just say that, for the last decade or so, Iran has produced many of the world’s most remarkable films and filmmakers. Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, and Majid Majidi, to name just a few, are among a select group of active directors who consistently meld craftsmanship, beauty, honesty, and a vital social-political voice. For more info, check out my friend Acquarello’s invaluable site, Strictly Film School.

    Majidi’s Children of Heaven is a sweet little film that I can’t help but compare to two of my all-time favorites: Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). Like De Sica’s classic of Italian Neo-Realism, Children of Heaven concerns a hard-working father who wants only to provide for his wife and children, but who is trapped in a world that seems determined to frustrate him. Like Ray, Majidi tells his story from the low-angle perspective of the children, a boy, Ali, and his younger sister, Zahra. The plot turns on Ali’s having lost Zahra’s only pair of shoes and on their efforts to recover them, which are often pathetic but never overly sentimental. Majidi must surely have been thinking of Ray’s original Apu (Subir Bannerjee) when he cast Amir Farrokh Hashemian as Ali, for the two share that wide-eyed yearning on which the success of both films depends. (As a strange aside, both boys also remind me a great deal of my oldest nephew.)

    Like his predecessors, Majidi shoots on location and employs non-professional actors, which lends the film an urgency often lacking in Western productions. But it’s also quite beautifully filmed, contrasting stunning images of Tehran’s superhighways, mansions, and high rises with its alleys, markets, and elementary schools. Children of Heaven would be a great rental for any of you who might otherwise be reluctant to enter the “Foreign Films” aisle. Most reviews in the popular press have described it as “heartwarming,” which it certainly is, and it also delivers a deliriously tense finale. While the film lacks the explicit political critique of something like Panahi’s The Circle (banned by Iranian officials) or Kiarostami’s Close-Up, it offers a wonderfully told story, and it also performs a service that is terribly important right now: Our hearts should be warmed to the people of the Middle East, the people who are (or who soon will be) hiding out under the devastation of our bombing campaigns.

    (P.S. I realize that that last sentence smacks of stereotypical bleeding-heart liberalism. But, well, sometimes that’s a good thing.)

  • Beau Travail (2000)

    Claire Denis’s Beau Travail is a remarkable film. A loose adaptation of Billy Budd, it transposes Melville’s sea voyage to a French foreign legion outpost in East Africa, where the Claggart character (Sergeant Galoup, played brilliantly by Denis Lavant) plots the inevitable destruction of Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin), who stands in for Billy. Melville’s novella provides only a rough narrative framework, though. Denis seems less concerned with that epic, allegorical showdown between good and evil — although in one remarkable image, her camera looks down on the men as they circle one another, spiraling closer and closer until they are face to face in a tight close-up — and less concerned, also, with the Christian iconography that punctuates Melville’s prose.

    Instead, Beau Travail foregrounds the concerns of much contemporary Melville scholarship and would probably make a wonderful teaching tool because of it. So, whereas post-colonial critics have, in turn, criticized/praised Melville for his appropriation of racist stereotypes (or his subversion of those stereotypes, depending on which side of the debate each critic stands), Denis situates Melville’s moral dilemma in an explicitly post-colonial situation, complicating further the relationships between European and African, Christian and Muslim, and calling into question the political value and motivations underlying those relationships. In several memorable scenes, the legionnaires exhaust themselves in senseless and utterly futile chores — digging holes, moving stones, repairing unused roads — all the while Africans look on, curious and silent but unmistakably present.

    Likewise, the homoeroticism of Melville’s texts is displayed in beautiful shot after beautiful shot of the legionnaires in training. At one point, they perform a training exercise in which each man throws his body at a partner, ending in an embrace that is both menacing and welcomed. Appropriating the tropes of stereotypical “basic training” sequences (see Full Metal Jacket), Denis brings to the fore those odd narratives that write gender onto our fighting men. She makes particularly good use of Galoup, whose voice and memories narrate the film. Galoup is not an embodiment of pure evil and jealousy like Claggart. Instead, he seems to be motivated by repressed desire — desire for authority and acceptance, but also, the film suggests, homosexual desire. Lavant is just a marvel throughout Beau Travail. As I recall, we hear him speak only in a stylized voice-over (there might be a few exceptions of diegetic speech), but he communicates with perfect clarity through his body language. The film’s final sequence might be impossible to explain, but it felt to me like another of those moments of grace that I’m constantly seeking.

    Beau Travail is also just a beautiful film to look at — stunning images cut together using a poetic logic that is part Eisenstein montage, part neo-realism, part Tarkovsky mysticism. The directors who most often came to mind were Kiarostami, Dumont, and Malick, though I never would have guessed beforehand that those three would ever be found sitting around the same table. A couple useful links:

  • The Sweet Sting

    The Sweet Sting

    With nothing better to do last Saturday night, my wife and I found ourselves watching Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused again. Aside from my lingering obsession with Sixteen Candles, I’ve never been a big fan of teen comedies. Most are cut-and-paste collages of cliches and bad pop that are too busy romanticizing high school to remember how much it sucked and how damn interesting the typical teenager really is. I’m not being ironic this time. Seriously.

    The best compliment I can give Dazed and Confused is that it makes me deliriously nostalgic. My American Heritage calls “nostalgia” a “bittersweet longing,” which gets it just about right, I think. I’ve never been one to miss high school. I would guess that in the last ten years I’ve spoken to three people from my class. But I do occasionally find myself longing for something from those days, something lacking in the day to day management of adult life.

    Joanna and I chatted about this as we watched Dazed and Confused Saturday night (as adults are wont to do — we chat), and we decided that that something is an “intensity of experience” only found amidst the stew of anxiety and wonder that is adolescence. Think about it. When you’re in high school, whose car you ride around in on Friday night matters. And who sees you in that car matters even more. It’s not trivial, although I think we adults like to console ourselves by pretending it is. In fact, I’m not sure that anything I’ve done in the last ten years has mattered as intensely as almost everything mattered when I was fifteen. Dazed and Confused gets that just right, which makes it the only teen movie that, well, that matters.

    Watching it again, I was really struck by this conversation, which is also just right.

    Mike: I’m serious, man, we should be up for anything.
    Cynthia: I know. We are. But what? I mean, God, don’t you ever feel like everything we do and everything we’ve been taught is just to service the future.
    Tony: Yeah, I know. It’s like it’s all preparation.
    Cynthia: Right. But what are we preparing ourselves for?
    Mike: {glib} Death.
    Tony: Life of the party.
    Mike: {glib again} It’s true.
    Cynthia: You know, but that’s valid. Because if we’re all gonna die anyways, shouldn’t we be enjoying ourselves now? You know, I’d like to quit thinking of the present, like right now, as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else.
    Mike: Exactly. Man, that’s what everyone in this car needs is some good ol’, worthwhile, visceral experience.

    Sure, it’s a bit carpe diem-ish — and I usually recoil at anything that smacks of Robin Williams sentimentality — but there’s also something wonderfully freeing in that existential naivety. That “insignificant preamble” stuff has come up often in my conversations with other well-adjusted adults lately. Odd.

  • Un Chien Andalou

    Un Chien Andalou

    Over the years, I have, of course, heard and read a great deal about Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou (1929), but until Friday I had never actually seen it. Created in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Bunuel’s first film is most remembered today for one of its opening sequences, which cuts between shots of a razor blade, a woman whose left eye is being forced open, and a thin line of clouds passing before a full moon. Just as we’ve become convinced that the cloud and moon will serve as a symbolic gesture, comfortably eliding the violence implied by the sequence, Bunuel cuts to a close-up of the eyeball being sliced open. The scene still works, more than seven decades later.

    My favorite discussion of the sequence can be found in Virginia Carmichael’s Framing History, where she compares Bunuel’s film to E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, a novel that attempts to make sense of the early Cold War years. There’s a remarkable and disturbing moment in the novel when the title character reaches over to burn his young wife with a car cigarette lighter. Instead of showing the horrible scene, though, Doctorow (through his narrator) attacks the reader, writing:

    Shall I continue? Do you want to know the effect of three concentric circles of heating element glowing orange in the black night of rain upon the tender white girlflesh of my wife’s ass? Who are you anyway? Who told you you could read this? Is nothing sacred? (60)

    Carmichael on the scene:

    What seems merely gratuitous cinematographic aestheticism on Bunuel’s part becomes something more radically critical in a political sense when considered as [Daniel’s] symbolic discovery of the function of symbolism in history to mask the horrors of reality—realities such as Stalin’s purges, the U.S. government’s knowing exposure of government workers to high-level radiation. (143)

    So much of contemporary filmmaking is about misdirection, about exciting the emotions and disregarding the consequences. I appreciate Bunuel’s film for its refusal to let us off so easily, though I must admit that, as with so much of Modernist surrealism, I found myself often stunned by the images but unwilling to engage in the intellectual gamesmanship necessary to decode them. I’m sure that great articles have been written that carefully trace contours through the fifteen minute film, but I couldn’t find the motivation to do so myself.

  • A Few Words Upon Discovering Cassavetes

    A Few Words Upon Discovering Cassavetes

    John Cassevetes is my latest obsession. On a whim, I recently picked up a used copy of Faces (1968), the story of Dicky and Maria Forst’s disastrous attempts to find peace and companionship outside of their loveless marriage. Shot entirely in stark, high-contrast black-and-white, and featuring Cassevetes’s trademark dialogue, Faces feels at times like a documentary — voyeuristic, discomforting, and brutally real.

    It took me about 15 minutes to fall into the film’s rhythms and style — the opening sequence might be its weakest — but by the time we see Dicky and Maria alone together at the dinner table, I was absolutely hooked. Faces is like the New Wave meets Edward Albee, as it builds its emotional conflict from the tension between the characters’ false surface bravado and all of those painfully insecure close-ups. I’m amazed by how genuine some of the shifts in emotion feel.

    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) might be a more refined film, but it’s also, I think, less satisfying. Ben Gazarra’s performance as Cosmo Vitelli, a strip club owner deep in debt to dangerous men, is always convincing and occasionally brilliant. But nowhere does he (or maybe it’s the material) reach the same plaintive heights achieved by Lynn Carlin and Gena Rowlands in Faces. Still, though, his closing monologue is the best scene I’ve seen in some time. His fate is now sealed, yet he manages to inspire a strange joy and pride and community among his performers. It’s almost like a moment of grace.

    Special mention goes to Bookie for featuring the always fascinating Tim Carey, most memorable for his performances in the early Kubrick films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. There are several scenes here in which his castmates (especially Seymour Cassel) seem almost apprehensive — or even afraid — around Carey. Those moments give the film a nice spark, an odd bit of unpredictable energy.

  • Adaptation (2002)

    Adaptation (2002)

    Last night my wife made some kind of sarcastic comment — a not unusual occurrence around our home — and I responded with, “Oh, honey, irony is so 2001.” After two or three seconds of silence we both laughed.

    The problems of irony, particularly when of the postmodern bent, are on mind-numbing display in Adaptation, a film that collapses under its own self-referential weight so many times that, at some point — and I think it was right about the time that Meryl Streep started humping Chris Cooper — I stopped watching the film and began waiting for it to end. Which is a shame because there are moments in it that are quite good, especially those few scenes when we get to listen to Susan Orlean’s beautiful prose in voice over. If we are to believe anything in the script — a big if, I realize — we can assume that it was that prose that inspired Charlie Kaufman to begin his adaptation in the first place. Or maybe it was the beauty, that most mysterious and troublesome of encounters for the postmodern ironist. I feel about Adaptation like I did the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There a little over a year ago: I’d be much more willing to accept their cynicism if they hadn’t given me glimpses of something more.

    But as the Coens, Kaufman, and Spike Jonze would surely tell me, “That is precisely our point, man.” (Well, I don’t know if they’d add the “man,” but most apologists for these films probably would.) There’s even a nice little bit in Adaptation when Donald Kaufman tells his brother that he’s decided to add to his screenplay a “snake eating its own tail.” “Ouroboros,” Charlie tells him. “He’s called Ouroboros, and that’s me.” Get it? Kaufman (the real Kaufman) has covered all the bases, predicted and undercut our arguments, sealed off any avenue of epistemological escape. And you know what? I just don’t care.

    Adaptation may have felt fresh to me if it had been released thirty-five years ago, or if I had never watched a Godard film or read The French Lieutenant’s Woman (and seen the adaptation, also starring Streep), or if I were oblivious to Sam Shepard, whose True West casts a formidable shadow here. But it’s not fresh and, aside from several amazing performances, it’s not even that interesting. I can’t decide if that opinion leaves me resigned to the realm of the unhip or if I’ve somehow transcended the unhip and circled back around to hip again. But, again, who really cares?

    On a side note, before Adaptation I was subjected to the trailer for Bruce Willis’s next film, Tears of the Sun. Based on this trailer alone, I’m going to pray that this film not only fails miserably at the box office, but that it takes down the careers of everyone involved, too. Imagine a jingoistic and imperialist version of Rambo. (See? There remains the proper time and place for effective irony.)

  • Time Out (2001)

    Time Out (2001)

    What separates Time Out from the recent spate of “disillusioned upper-middle-class white guy has a breakdown” movies is writer/director Laurent Cantet’s interest in the specific economic forces that lead — some would say inevitably — to such discontent. Aurélien Recoing plays Vincent, recently fired from a position he had held unhappily for more than a decade. Ashamed of his failure and unable to escape nagging anxieties, Vincent reinvents himself as an imagined UN employee, while bilking friends out of investment capital that will, he assures them, return steep profits in Africa’s “emerging markets.”

    American treatments of this theme tend to elide the messy problems of multinational capitalism — the massive systems of exploitation and profit that reify workers at every stage. Cantet refuses to let us off so easily. Employing an odd mixture of Hitchcockian logic and late-Bressonian critique, he drops us instantly into a world of systematic victimization where the conflation of financial and humanitarian interests, now indistinguishable from one another in our contemporary public discourse, is exposed as fraudulent and disastrous. Unlike, say, American Beauty, which (satire or not) encourages us to take delight in Lester’s impotent rebellion, Time Out forces us to suffer alongside our representative hero. Whereas Lester gets to experience something like grace (or so the film’s defenders would argue), Vincent’s fate is determined, once again, by market forces. As his wealthy and influential father tells him in the penultimate scene, “Money problems can always be solved.”

  • Best Films of 2002

    Best Films of 2002

    For me, 2002 will be most remembered for the Actors Theatre’s production of Angels in America, which I saw while visiting Phoenix in October and which only qualifies for a mention here because if Mike Nichols’s rumored seven hour adaptation of the plays captures even half of the magic and the joy of Tony Kushner’s language then it will surely be the best film I see in 2003. I spent the rest of the year, though, here in Knoxville, TN with its two screens devoted to interesting fare, leaving me grossly ill-equipped to make sweeping generalizations about the year in movies. (Ask me again in ten months.) Instead, here are some impressions of the 2002 film experiences that still linger.

    The only film that I watched three days in a row, more enraptured by it each time, was Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? The magic of the film for me is found in Lu Yi-ching’s performance. In this remarkable woman, a widow experiencing the mysteries of mourning and loss, Tsai has offered a counterargument to all who would summarily dismiss his films as simply Antonioni-like laments of alienation. What Time was also the most beautiful film I saw all year, featuring brilliant camera work from Benoît Delhomme.

    My favorite sequence from any film was buried in the middle of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan stands before his dream woman, Emily Watson, while the rest of his world collapses around him. A screaming telephone harasses him, a forklift crashes, and the voices of his coworkers conspire in a cacophony of fits and shrieks. I actually laughed out loud during the scene, partly as a temporary reprieve from the tension, partly out of sheer admiration for Anderson’s gifts. Punch-Drunk Love earns my “outstanding sound design” award for 2002. Hitchcock would have loved it.

    The most consistently entertaining film I saw was Roger Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which manages to be both provocative and surprisingly even-handed. Setting out to discover why we Americans are so good at shooting each other, Moore finally offers few concrete answers but succeeds in undercutting the most commonly held misconceptions, by conservatives and liberals alike. Moore still struggles occasionally to balance his earnest concern with parody, but the film makes a quality statement. Bowling is worth seeing for its interview with Charlton Heston alone—the most cringe-inducing moment in a film littered with cringe-inducing moments.

    The film experience that I most cherish from this year was getting to sit beside my parents for a screening of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which was sponsored by the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts and accompanied by the Annapolis Chorale’s performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light. My parents had never seen Passion, or anything like it. Their silence as we walked through the hushed crowd toward our car is testament, I think, to the sublime majesty of Dreyer’s film.

    And finally, a short list of films that I saw for the first time in 2002 and that made me a better man for it: Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson), La Promesse (Dardenne), Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman), Good Men, Good Women (Hou), Waking Life (Linklater), The Children of Paradise (Carne), and Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier).

  • Tarkovsky and Sandwiches

    Tarkovsky and Sandwiches

    I spent my lunch hour (and then some) sitting around a table with the senior pastor of a Presbyterian church, the priest of a local Orthodox congregation, and three other laymen (for lack of a better word). We were brought together by several strokes of remarkably good fortune, the intricacies of which would take much too long to explain here. The long and short of it, though, is that we got together to talk about a movie.

    Not just any movie, mind you, but one of the best, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev — that poetic, mystical, transcendant biopic of the 15th century Russian icon painter. Rublev was the first Tarkovsky film that I saw, and I’m still feeling the consequences. That I’m even posting to Long Pauses can be attributed directly to that viewing and to the awakening that it inspired in me.

    Last fall I spent nearly three months preparing and leading discussions of the arts with a group of friends from my church. The experience was at times frustrating, at times beautiful. What I soon realized was how muddied the discourse of faith/religion and art/creativity is. I’m not sure what exactly I mean by “muddied,” except that it seems to get at some of the dogmatic biases that hinder productive communication between peoples of differing theological bents. I honestly believe that art — or any medium, really, through which God reveals His presence in immediate, often non-verbal ways — can serve the reconciliation of His church. But until I led those discussions, I never knew how tricky a proposition it could be.

    What I found most gratifying about today’s meeting was the generosity of all involved, the obvious sense that we were gathering for a communal and (I use this word with some hesitation) sacred experience. Perhaps that is ultimately testament to Tarkovsky’s genius. He strove throughout his career to capture on film images that would force viewers to experience complex and contradictory emotions and, in the process, to be rendered capable of spiritual improvement. As we spoke — and we certainly spoke more about God than about the film — I was reminded often of how well he had succeeded. Instead of debating the particulars of plot developments or performances or special effects, as is often the case when Americans gather to talk movies, we struggled to make sense of the lingering emotions and longings that Rublev had wrestled from us. A friend calls this “creational theology” — the desire to better understand the mysteries of God by studying his revelation.

    I hope to have a full response to Rublev up by the end of the week. After being online for just over a year now, I guess it’s about time that I tried to write about the site’s inspiration.

  • Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

    Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: As in most of Bergman’s b&w films, the interplay of darkness and light is a critical motif here, as seen most obviously in the images of Karin’s outstretched arms in the hull of the shipwreck and in her decision to wear sunglasses near the end of the film. The light motif is also realized in Bergman’s frequent shots of windows that open onto a distant horizon across the sea. My favorite instance comes after a bedroom exchange between Karin and Martin, when she turns her back to him, and the camera pans slowly to the right, fixing its gaze on the setting sun. The film is also notable for its strangely erotic subtext, created by a number of shots, among them: David’s hand on Karin’s shoulder as she drifts off to sleep; the stationary, low-angle shots of Karin alone in the wallpapered room; and, of course, the charged encounters between Karin and Minus.

    • • •

    The first of Bergman’s chamber dramas, Through a Glass Darkly concerns a family vacationing on the Baltic island of Fårö, where their alienation from one another is mirrored in the bleak landscape that surrounds them. The patriarch, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), is a widower and best-selling novelist, whose life is marked solely by professional ambition and emotional detachment. His daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), is a schizophrenic plagued by rapturous voices that promise the imminent return of God. She is tended by her husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), and by her younger brother, Minus (Lars Passgard), neither of whom is capable of offering her lasting comfort. Not surprisingly, Bergman constructs the film so as to allow his players to ruminate on his chief, career-long concerns: the struggle with inspiration in the life of an artist, the silence of God, and the potential redemption afforded by human love.

    To begin at the end . . .

    In the film’s final scene, David stands with his son before an open window, their faces mostly lost in shadow. Shaken by his sister’s most recent collapse and her subsequent evacuation by helicopter, Minus laments his loss of faith in God and man. The world has suddenly become torn open for the teenager, exposing its existential horror, and he can no longer imagine his place in it. “Give me a proof of God,” he begs of his father. David responds:

    I can only give you an indication of my own hope. It’s knowing that love exists for real in the human world. . . . The highest and lowest, the most ridiculous and the most sublime. All kinds. . . . I don’t know whether love is proof of God’s existence, or if love is God. . . . Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and hopelessness into life. It’s like a reprieve, Minus, from a sentence of death.

    If we are to think of Through a Glass Darkly in musical terms, as Bergman encourages us to do, then David’s speech is a coda that resolves on a picardy third — that often surprising, but seldom satisfying moment when a piece in a minor key ends on a major chord. It’s one of only a very few instances in Bergman’s films that rings hollow to me. It feels, in fact, like a near desperate attempt to mask over the more honestly realized anguish and suffering that characterize the eighty minutes preceding. That the director was able to more satisfactorily resolve the problem a decade later in Cries and Whispers is perhaps evidence that here his ideas are still gestating, not yet fully formed.

    What Bergman does get absolutely right in Through a Glass Darkly, though, is the very real horror of the existential crisis, the moment when Camus’s Sisyphus pauses, watching his stone roll once again down the mountain. In the penultimate sequence, Karin returns to the upstairs bedroom where, throughout the film, we have watched her communicate with the imagined harbingers of God’s return. Perhaps inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, Karin’s delusional conversations are mediated by the room’s tattered wallpaper and are charged (as is much of the film) with a discomforting eroticism. When David and Martin discover her, Karin is ecstatic, her glazed eyes fixed on the door through which God will soon appear. In a beautifully rendered scene, she falls to her knees and asks her stoic husband to join her. Von Sydow’s remarkable face is a conflicted mess of sorrow and love and humiliation and desire. But he kneels beside her, impotent in his attempts to calm her as she waits.

    What follows is one of film’s most terrifying moments: God’s arrival in the form of the ambulatory helicopter, greeted by a grotesque dance of fits and shrieks from Karin. She throws her body into a corner, howling in agony and recoiling at the advances of her family, who look on, hopeless. If the finale of Carl Dreyer’s Ordet is a cinematic document of genuine Christian faith, then Karin’s rapture is its funhouse mirror reflection: a hopeless portrait of abject nihilism. Once calmed and quieted, Karin describes what she saw:

    The door opened, but the god was a spider. He came up to me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He scrambled up and tried to penetrate me, but I defended myself. All along I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn’t penetrate me, he continued up my chest, up into my face and onto the wall. I have seen God.

    Camus demands that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” — that in his very recognition of life’s absurdity Sisyphus has made a heroic gesture toward freedom — but Bergman, except in the aforementioned coda, refuses to offer even that promise. Karin puts on her sunglasses, shutting out the light that she has quite literally and so desperately sought throughout the film, and willingly surrenders herself to the medics. Despite David’s closing words, and the apparent reconciliation with Minus that they engender, I experience little catharsis from the film, knowing that Karin’s surrender is complete and, ultimately, fatal.

    Strangely, it’s Karin’s plight, and that of so many like her in Bergman’s films, that draws me again and again to his work. There is, in that dramatization of the existential crisis, something of what Christian aesthetician Frank Burch Brown calls “negative transcendence”: “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.” I’ve become quite fond of that concept, applying it repeatedly to Bergman and sharing it often with friends who are struggling to make sense of their admiration for supposedly Godless films like Magnolia. In Through a Glass Darkly, I think, Bergman stages that crisis more brutally than anywhere in his canon, and the film is better for it.

  • 2003 Film Diary

    2003 Film Diary

    January
    1 Glengarry Glen Ross [Foley]
    3 Sweet Home Alabama [Tennant]
    4 Andrei Rublev [Tarkovsky]
    5 Fellowship of the Ring [Jackson]
    7 The Royal Tenenbaums [Anderson]
    10 Taste of Cherry [Kiarostami]
    11 In Praise of Love [Godard]
    12 Faces [Cassavetes]
    13 The Hole [Tsai]
    14 A Woman is a Woman [Godard]
    16 The Lady from Shanghai [Welles]
    17 The Silence [Bergman]
    19 13 Conversations about One Thing [Sprecher]
    21 The Road Home [Zhang]
    22 Close-Up [Kiarostami]
    23 Ivan’s Childhood [Tarkovsky]
    25 Time Out [Cantet]
    26 Adaptation [Jonze]
    27 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [Cassavetes]
    31 Un Chien Andalou [Bunuel]
    February
    1 Celine and Julie Go Boating [Rivette]
    2 Burnt by the Sun [Mikhalkov]
    7 Ice Age [Wedge]
    8 Mother [Pudovkin]
    8 Dazed and Confused [Linklater]
    9 The Hours [Daldry]
    14 The Color of Pomegranates [Parajanov]
    16 McCabe and Mrs. Miller [Altman]
    20 Talk to Her [Almodovar]
    22 Rebels of the Neon God [Tsai]
    23 Twelve Angry Men [Lumet]
    24 Beau Travail [Denis]
    28 Pather Panchali [Ray]
    March
    1 Les Bonnes Femmes [Chabrol]
    1 Earth [Dovzhenko]
    3 The River [Tsai]
    5 Blue [Kieslowski]
    6 The Two Towers [Jackson]
    7 The Big Kahuna [Swanbeck]
    12 What Time Is It There? [Tsai]
    14 Chunhyang [Im]
    16 The Pianist [Polanski]
    26 The Circle [Panahi]
    April
    13 Children of Heaven [Majidi]
    22 Sarabande [Egoyan]
    25 Y Tu Mamá También [Cuarón]
    26 Secret World Live [Gabriel]
    28 The Wind Will Carry Us [Kiarostami]
    30 Baran [Majidi]
    May
    3 Magnolia [Anderson]
    3 Far from Heaven [Haynes]
    4 The Piano [Campion]
    7 X-Men 2 [Singer]
    9 Undercover Brother [Lee]
    10 Maborosi [Kore-eda]
    16 Solaris [Tarkovsky]
    17 Mirror [Tarkovsky]
    18 Mirror [Tarkovsky]
    19 Trouble in Paradise [Lubitsch]
    20 Trouble in Paradise [Lubitsch]
    21 A Mighty Wind [Guest]
    22 Don’t Look Now [Roeg]
    26 Hedwig and the Angry Inch [Mitchell]
    26 Donnie Darko [Kelly]
    31 All That Heaven Allows [Sirk]
    June
    2 All About My Mother [Almodovar]
    5 Finding Nemo [Stanton and Unkrich]
    6 Red [Kieslowski]
    8 A Woman Under the Influence [Cassavetes]
    10 Code Unknown [Haneke]
    14 The Journals of Jean Seberg [Rappaport]
    15 The Journals of Jean Seberg [Rappaport]
    18 The Matrix [the Wachowskis]
    27 Dumb and Dumberer [Miller]
    27 Flesh for Frankenstein [Morrissey]
    29 High Fidelity [Frears]
    29 Punch-Drunk Love [Anderson]
    30 Blood of Dracula [Morrissey]
    July
    August
    5 Capturing the Friedmans [Jarecki]
    13 The Color of Paradise [Mahidi]
    14 Russian Ark [Sokurov]
    21 Rock Hudson’s Home Movies [Rappaport]
    31 Opening Night [Cassavetes]
    September
    7 Throne of Blood [Kurosawa]
    8 The Trials of Henry Kissinger [Jarecki]
    20 Harold & Maude [Ashby]
    30 Lost in Translation [Coppola]
    October
    4 Shampoo [Ashby]
    7 Coming Home [Ashby]
    19 The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming [Jewison]
    19 From Hell [Hughes Brothers]
    20 Diary of a Chambermaid [Bunuel]
    24 Pirates of the Caribbean [Verbinski]
    26 Minnie and Moskowitz [Cassavetes]
    November
    2 Band of Outsiders [Godard]
    7 Elf [Favreau]
    9 After Life [Kore-eda]
    12 Rikyu [Teshigahara]
    12 A Perfect Candidate [Cutler & Van Taylor]
    14 The Station Agent [McCarthy]
    22 Maborosi [Kore-eda]
    25 Talk to Her [Almodovar]
    29 Master and Commander [Weir]
    30 Fox and His Friends [Fassbainder]
    December
    2 Gerry [Van Sant]
    6 Light Keeps Me Company [Nykvist]
    7 Blackboards [Makhmalbaf]
    7 Angels in America: Millennium Approaches [Nichols]
    8 Angels in America: Millennium Approaches [Nichols]
    12 Calendar [Egoyan]
    13 Harold and Maude [Ashby]
    14 Angels in America: Perstroika [Nichols]
    15 Angels in America: Perstroika [Nichols]
    16 Spellbound [Blitz]
    17 Return of the King [Jackson]
    25 A Mighty Wind [Guest]
    26 Sergeant York [Hawks]
    26 Best in Show [Guest]
    29 The Last Detail [Ashby]
    30 Bottle Rocket [Anderson]
  • Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Full Metal Jacket (1987)

    Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

    Images: All of the Kubrick trademarks are on display here: languid tracking shots, perfectly symmetrical compositions, slow dissolves, Barry Lyndon-style zoom outs, and thematic changes of color temperature (most noticeable in both blue-tinted scenes involving Pyle). Favorite images: Joker’s “war face,” the long shot of Mr. Touchdown’s crumpling body, the interview segments, “the Jungian thing, sir,” and Pyle’s “major malfunction.”

    • • •

    “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.”
    — Michael Herr, Dispatches

    Full Metal Jacket has been unfairly characterized by many as a deeply flawed narrative, a film whose brilliant first act overshadows the “in country” sequences that follow. I’ll admit to having spent some time myself in that camp. Lee Ermey’s kinetic performance as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is a sight of strange beauty; his uber-masculine, profanity-fueled taunts are terrifying both for their misogyny and for their undeniable appeal. Likewise, Vincent D’Onofrio’s turn as the pathetic Private Pyle invites us to experience Parris Island by way of a comfortable narrative convention: the bildungsroman. Though unusually impersonal and free of easy sentiment (both Kubrick trademarks), the basic training sections of FMJ essentially conform to our classic genre expectations, mapping out the well-worn path from raw recruit to U.S. Marine.

    That Kubrick undercuts his coming-of-age story with Pyle’s brutal murder/suicide has led many to call Full Metal Jacket an anti-war movie, one that challenges America’s call for “a few good men” and the very processes (militaristic and sociological) that create them. While that’s certainly true—and I’ll soon return to Kubrick’s critique of masculinity—I wonder if it might be more useful to call FMJ an anti war-movie movie. For the auteur is obviously fascinated, in a deliberately self-reflexive way, with the influence of images and storytelling on the formation of what might be described as ideological mythology, that is, the conventions of belief and behavior imposed upon us through cultural narratives by various makers of meaning. Kubrick, always an intellectual filmmaker (and I would deny the negative connotations so often attached to that word), destabilizes those familiar myths, appropriately representing the Vietnam War by way of a narrative that, like the war itself, frustrates expectations and refuses progress.

    Private Joker’s opening line—”Is that you, John Wayne? Is this me?”—serves as a refrain throughout FMJ, making explicit the unspoken ties that bind America’s victory in WWII (and the subsequent cinematic representations of it) to the Cold War ideology that made Vietnam possible. In the film’s most self-reflexive sequence, a camera crew interviews a platoon of grunts, who affect bravado, but seem genuinely bewildered by the failure of their actual war experience to conform to their preconceived notions of “heroism,” “bravery,” and “sacrifice.” The aptly named Private Cowboy (Arliss Howard) describes the battle at Hue as the first to be like “what [he] thought a war was supposed to be. There’s the enemy. Kill him.” Another wonders why the locals are unappreciative of their efforts: “They’d rather be alive than free, I guess. Poor dumb bastards.” The stories of American masculinity and historical progress—written during WWII by their fathers, political leaders, and commanding officers—are revealed to be little more than Tall Tales.

    In that sense, John Wayne, I guess, is like Pecos Bill. Despite the interesting moral ambiguity of some of his finer roles, for many critics of the Cold War he serves more often as an icon, a shorthand referent to the nostalgia and arrogance that continues to characterize so much of America’s foreign and domestic policy. In Dispatches, journalist and FMJ co-writer Michael Herr complains that neither the Duke’s brand of flag-waving patriotism nor the traditional Hollywood films in which it was trumpeted could possibly make sense of the morally ambiguous Vietnam experience. “The Green Berets doesn’t count,” Herr writes. “That wasn’t really about Vietnam, it was about Santa Monica.” Hartmann’s murder, then, is a symbolic gesture for Kubrick, a violent erasure of an anachronistic icon. Watch the scene again, and notice how closely Hartmann’s voice and swagger mimic John Wayne’s when he learns that Pyle’s rifle is loaded: “Now you listen to me, private pyle, and you listen good.”

    Like Herr’s and several of the other landmark accounts of Vietnam—Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, in particular—Full Metal Jacket proposes a new narrative form, one that capitalizes on the contradictions of war instead of reducing them to an impossibly coherent heroic myth. Gone are the noble feats of bravery that would lead, inevitably, to the taking of Pork Chop Hill or to victory at Iwo Jima. Gone are the rag tag group of soldiers who share stories from “back home” and pour over letters from Mom. Instead, Kubrick splices the “in country” acts into disjointed episodes, leaving viewers, like the soldiers onscreen, wandering without direction.

    Nowhere is Kubrick’s narrative strategy more obvious and effective than in the film’s closing sequence, that moment when we most desire closure. After showing Joker (Matthew Modine) fire his pistol into a dying female sniper, Kubrick cuts to a long shot of soldiers on the march from left to right across the screen, their figures silhouetted by the fires burning throughout Hue. Then, in the final cut of the film, Kubrick deliberately breaks the 180 degree rule: we now see Joker in a medium shot as he and the others march from right to left. By maintaining continuity through the soundtrack, Kubrick prevents the unusual cut from being as jarring as one might expect, but the implications are obvious: unlike traditional war films, Full Metal Jacket has refused to honor our journey by arriving at any prescribed destination. Instead, we continue to hump it back and forth, longing for the direction and ideological stability of Parris Island.

    • • •

    As a side note, I felt almost compelled to write this response after watching Full Metal Jacket last night—the first time I had seen it in several years. Despite my deep affection for Kubrick, I had always felt strangely ambivalent about this film, mostly, I think, because I considered it a retread of concerns that had already been tackled in better films: the possibility of noble action in war (Paths of Glory), technological hubris (2001), Cold War ideology (Dr. Strangelove), and the dehumanizing influence of the State over the individual (A Clockwork Orange). But after spending several months knee-deep in some of the best literature to emerge from the Vietnam experience, Full Metal Jacket struck me with something of the force of revelation. This really is an impressive film. One of Kubrick’s best.

    Reading suggestions:

    • David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Streamers, and Sticks and Bones
    • Michael Herr: Dispatches
    • Gustav Hasford: The Short-Timers
    • Tim O’Brien: Going After Cacciato
    • Bobbie Ann Mason: In Country
    • Joan Didion: Democracy
  • Ordet (1955)

    Ordet (1955)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Ordet is, quite simply, one of the most beautifully photographed films ever made. Dreyer’s cinematographic trademarks are all on display: slow, elegant tracking shots and pans; stylized, almost expressionistic lighting; meticulously orchestrated movements and compositions. Favorite images: those clothes blowing in the wind, Morten Borgen isolated (as in his life) in the lower right corner of the frame, Peter the Tailor’s family arriving at the funeral a la The Searchers (also one of my all-time favorite music cues), and, of course, any number of shots from the final sequence.

    • • •

    Politics is easy. So are history, biography, and formal technique. But transcendence is tough. That sudden, strange, and fleeting encounter with something beyond ourselves, something almost otherworldly, transcendence is both the aspect of the arts to which I’m most drawn and about which I feel least capable of writing. Which is why it is only now, two years after I first saw Dreyer’s Ordet and instantly declared it one of my favorite films, that I’m making an attempt to explain its peculiar power. If you haven’t seen Ordet, please stop reading. This response will likely touch upon the film’s closing sequence, which really should be experienced for the first time free of prejudice. It’s one of film’s truly remarkable moments. Don’t let me spoil it for you.

    Based on Kaj Munk’s play of the same name, Ordet tells the simple story of Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg), a prosperous farmer whose three sons have each laid a particular burden on their father’s shoulders. The eldest, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), has renounced the religious beliefs of his ancestors, claiming that he no longer has even “faith in faith”; the second, Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), has gone mad from too much study and now claims to be Jesus of Nazareth; and the youngest, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), has disobeyed his father by pursuing the hand of a young woman whose religion puts her family at odds with the elder Borgen. On the surface, Ordet is primarily concerned with the Romeo and Juliet-like Anders plot, along with a more dramatic sidebar involving Mikkel’s wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), who dies with her infant son in childbirth.

    Ordet is really about faith, though. It’s about the mysteries and contradictions and beauty of such irrational belief. Unlike any other film I can name, though, Ordet treats this subject with both measured skepticism and reverence, forcing us to distance ourselves, even if only temporarily, from our personal beliefs so that we might reexperience “true faith” (whatever that is) free of cultural baggage and biases. Dreyer accomplishes this by way of something akin to the Verfremdungseffekt, Bertold Brecht’s “alienating” approach to theater. John Fuegi has described the purpose of the V-effekt as disrupting “the viewer’s normal or run of the mill perception by introducing elements that will suddenly cause the viewer to see familiar objects in a strange way and to see strange objects in a familiar way.” Ordet does both, defamiliarizing the now-mundane words of Christ, while also making perfectly acceptable the probability of miracles.

    We first see Johannes in a low-angle long shot, his right arm outstretched over a knoll of tall grass. He announces his mission in slow, measured tones: “God has summoned me to prophesy before His face,” he says. “For only those who have faith shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.” His words are familiar, as he echoes or recites-in-whole passages from the Gospels, but his delivery and his movements are stylized, strange, disconcerting. A typical audience’s response to Lerdorff Rye’s performance is mirrored onscreen by all who encounter Johannes. My favorite exchange is with the town’s new parson:

    Johannes: “You don’t know me. . . . My name is Jesus of Nazareth.”

    Parson: “Jesus? But how can you prove that?”

    Johannes: “Thou man of faith, whose own self lacks faith! People believe in the dead Christ, but not in the living. They believe in my miracles from 2000 years ago, but they don’t believe in me now. I have come again to bear witness to my Father who is in Heaven, and to work miracles.”

    Parson: “Miracles no longer happen.”

    Johannes: “Thus speaks my church on earth, that church which has failed me, that has murdered me in my own name. Here I stand, and again you cast me out. But woe unto you, if you nail me to the cross again.”

    Parson: “That’s absolutely appalling.”

    Again, capturing in words such a purely cinematic and transcendent moment is difficult and perhaps even counter-intuitive. I can only describe how these moments, which honestly seem to be particular to Ordet, make me feel. I grew up in the church, so the parables and teachings of Christ are barely distinguishable in my social/cultural memory from any number of myths, parables, fairy tales, and stories. They all seem to occupy the same part of my brain, formed some time during childhood, where they continue to shape the ethics and morals (and something like faith) that determine my behavior. Christ isn’t really real to me, or my life would be radically different. I imagine that is probably true of many Christians.

    But something happens to me during the last twenty minutes of Ordet. Johannes walks into Inger’s funeral chamber, emerging from the shadows of the doorway, and I experience an overwhelming gratitude, a peculiar emotion that I don’t recall ever feeling in any traditionally religious context. I mean real gratitude, mixed with shame and joy and awe and any number of other emotions and desires that I so seldom feel for things not of this world. I guess, in a word, that is transcendence, and I’m so grateful for this film for giving me that. It’s like a gift. Inger’s restoration to life suddenly feels not only possible here, but inevitable. And I’m left to wonder why, in the “real” world, I actually identify most with the obnoxious Parson, for surely miracles don’t really happen anymore.

    For Brecht, the use of the V-effekt in a film or play like Ordet would be a political tool, a means by which audiences might be wakened to their slavish acceptance of hypocritical or oppressive religious dogma. And, in a sense, Dreyer does just that. But, if I might slip into a hackneyed analogy, whereas Brecht would completely dismantle faith as a dangerous ideological construct, leaving it in ruins, Dreyer strips it to its foundations so that each viewer might potentially rebuild that faith, and rebuild more strongly.