...this pig's alley

SHADOWPLAY DAY!

2011-08-31T03:20:00.000-07:00

Everybody who follows film on the internet knows Mr. David Cairns. He hosts SHADOWPLAY, one of the finest film websites and probably the most original. David approaches online media as a separate medium and for the four years or so which I have followed the website, its innate unpredictability made each post a daily event, even when it was an established series such as Intertitle of the Week, Quote of the Day or mini-series such as Hitchcock Year or Borzage Week. Its inimitable style made its choice of links, fonts, backgrounds and juxtaposition of images inseparable from its wide-ranging content. Genuine eclecticism is on display in every single post. Even when Mr. Cairns approaches a traditional film subject (say Psycho), his exploration of the film is never conventional and rote. Indeed he manages to extricate the everlasting freshness that every great masterpiece carries with it, making regular Hitchcockians revisit this landmark film. He continues to post on his page every single day always remaining fresh and original. What is evident and inarguable in every post is the fact that more than his love for film is the fact that he truly loves writing about it. This real love for art is what separates the genuine writers from films such as Manny Farber, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Raymond Durgnat, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard from regular reviewers and able stylists.

On International Shadowplay, partisans are tasked with selecting their favourite post and sharing it online. As a card-carrying Shadowplayer (this post being where I came in) its really hard to pick a single favorite. For right now, I'll settle for this one. It has everything I love about SHADOWPLAY.

It's Let the Eagle Soar. As part of Hitchcock Year, David traced the proud Cockney's career from beginning to end over the course of a year, each week covered one of his films. The fact that Hitchcock's second official film, The Mountain Eagle, is lost did not stop Mr. Cairns. Oh no! He decided to go ahead and restore the film, pioneering and patenting the now widely used practise of "Dream Restorations". That is a film print does not exist, dream it, will it into being. The extent to which cinema can penetrate into people's lives, their dreams and memories returns us to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, an allegory which Bernardo Bertolucci likened to a blueprint of a movie theatre. All of which suggests that if history was altered and we longer had the words "film", "cinema", "movies" to refer to it, Shadowplay would be a pretty good alternative.

Mr. Cairns' favorite film-makers lean towards the image fabulists, he has written eloquently on Welles, Sternberg, Hitchcock, Lang and of course Michael Powell. Genuinely stimulating and original ruminations on cinema, aided by good-natured and much needed rustling up of the established canon(such as Mr. Cairns' case for the neglected Julien Duvivier) makes SHADOWPLAY a fun website as well as a fount of scholarly research on cinema.

Beyond the Forest (1949)

2011-02-19T04:21:00.000-08:00

Whether Film Noir is a genre, a mood, a style or a movement in American crime films of the 40s and 50s seems irresolvable. One reason for this is that the canon of noir has been established for a long while now and “noir” as such derives from the common features of the films which have been canonized. Movies like Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, Detour, Kiss Me Deadly, The Asphalt Jungle, Touch of Evil. A film like King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest has marginal similarities in terms of story with say, Double Indemnity and although it’s in black and white it has little of the crepuscular glamour typified in the work of John Alton. In its stark examination of the influence of social and environmental factors on personal character, it hearkens back to the period of American naturalism, of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser rather than James M. Cain or Chandler or Hammett.

As such the film is little seen today although it retains its notoriety; for its critical and commercial failure, for being the target of a supercilious book on supposed “Worst Movies”, for being regarded by Bette Davis herself as “a terrible movie”; more felicitously, it is known for serving as a reference point in an extended colloquy in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where George and Martha try to remember the identity of the film where Bette Davis utters the line, “What a dump!” They talk of various scenes in the film, such as the ending where Bette Davis’s character, suffering from peritonitis, nonetheless applies make-up and dresses up to finally go to “Chicago”.

With this assorted baggage one would expect Beyond the Forest to maintain some sort of interest but the film, like many of King Vidor's, is absent on DVD. The film itself offers good reasons for its harsh reception. Put it simply, it’s among the toughest and harshest American films since Stroheim’s Greed, unflinching in its portrayal of Rosa Moline, one of the frightening characters in American movies; so frightening that Bette Davis tried in vain to dial down the harshness of the characterization while Vidor was constantly upping the ante on production. The resulting tension between the director and actress which was widely publicized won the movie few favors, though as per Raymond Durgnat, it was one of Billy Wilder’s favourite films.

Beyond the Forest is set in Loyaltown Wisconsin, limned in a beautifully cut and economically narrated voiceover in the opening scene. The town revolves around the employment and business provided by a saw mill and its sole connection to big cities is a train track that is prominently featured in the town. At the beginning, the town is empty since everyone present is attending a murder trial, the accused being Rosa Moline who bursts into the screen from below the frame, screaming that she didn’t kill the victim and that she had no reason to. This segues into a flashback that lasts three-quarters of the film before returning back to the trial. The initial suspense of the film is the identity of the person murdered but already the voice-over directs us to the real focus of the film. It mentions that everyone in the town knew Rosa Moline, men, women, children and the main interest in the hearing is partly out of curiosity, what makes Rosa Moline different from other people. This curiosity is sustained right through the course of the film.

Being different from the others is the main quest of Rosa Moline’s life. Individualism was a theme that Vidor dealt with in several films from The Crowd through Show People, An American Romance and, of course, The Fountainhead. What makes Beyond the Forest unique is the ferocity with which it is embodied in Moline and how this ferocity is aggravated by the fact that the small town she lives in is in most respects a model community. Its residents are good neighbors and her husband is a dedicated community doctor and genuinely concerned and caring towards his patients and his wife.

Rosa Moline repays her husband's devotion by devising elaborate assignations with Neal Lattimer (David Brian), a playboy businessman from Chicago. The flashback begins by revealing the process by which Moline is able to manipulate people at her will. A tryst with Lattimer(who arrives via private plane) requires strategic deployment of her husband to an expectant mother(who's giving birth to her eighth child). Her husband's fishing friend Moose(Minor Watson) is easily distracted by a chance discovery of alcohol, placed exactly where Rosa expected him to find it. Rosa boasts later in the film that she has more brain in her fingertips than most of the townsfolk. She also has prowess with a shotgun which she promptly displays by murdering an innocent porcupine simply because she doesn't like the species.

Such charming character traits unloaded so swiftly one after the other is good example as any of King Vidor's peculiar qualities as a melodramatist. He painted in broad strokes and unsubtle images to depict a character's state. His most heightened touches in Beyond the Forest can register as garish or campy but they are also free of sensationalism and bad taste. Rosa Moline is a woman who thrives on hatred, for her environment, her town, her way of life and her marriage. She rebels against her fate but she also seems as a force of the wilderness herself. Like many of Vidor's figures she's firmly connected to her environment despite her hatred and revulsion for her lot in life. “When I think of the things I want," she says, "it’s like your stomach feels when it hasn’t any food in it.” Moline is driven by delusions of grandeur, commanded out of the basic human drives.

“I don’t want people to like me. Nothing pleases me more than when they don’t like me. It means I don’t belong.” – Rosa Moline

Beyond the Forest is closer to being a "woman's film" than a film noir. It's setting is provincial rather than urban, its sense of criminality comes less out of economic factors than a self-conscious desire to live out one's desires for romantic and personal self-fulfillment. What makes the film so much richer is the strong sense of the society which the characters live in. Rosa's dreams and desires are derived entirely out of consumerist material such as magazines and advertisements, her obsession with Chicago is summed up in the popular song of the same name(which Max Steiner outfits into a haunting, mocking refrain throughout the film). Her dislike for the town stems from the sawmill which serves as the economic backbone of the town. At night the fire, thrusting out of the chimney turret from the mill, illuminates the night sky, lighting her room and disturbing her sleep. Much as the film is focused on Rosa Moline, Vidor gives a strong sense of the economic structure of a small town and the hegemony enforced by bigger cities. Except for the one occassion in the film, Rosa has never Loyaltown to Chicago and yet its reach affects and transforms her character regardless of the distance at which she lives.

It is through this novelistic placement of the character in relation to her immediate and distant surroundings that Vidor is able to side with Rosa in viewing Loyaltown as a prison, keeping both her and the other town's characters in check. When Lewis Moline(Joseph Cotten) delivers the eight child of the woman, her husband remarks that it was only an hour before that he regretted and cursed his wife's pregnancy and yet is now happy and relieved. Rosa's all consuming hatred, her longing for "things I want" is her only defense, her only excuse for "always being different". A key scene is when Rosa tries to coddle money out of her husband so that she can visit Chicago. He claims to lack the money, which Rosa blames on his leniency to his patients payment of fees. Being the only GP of the town requires such leniency so as to maintain his practice. She cooly replies that she could do with less her required price.

The next scene, which follows Lewis walking past the town square to his building is framed in cuts which emphasize his linearity and confinement.

Every person Lewis passes by looks at him with unsteady, shifty faces. Rosa had asked all of them for the money Lewis had denied him. The first breach of her covert humiliation of her husband to the rest of society. Lewis is trapped and imprisoned in the same town as well. His image of a dedicated country doctor sparing him little in the way of hardship and ill-name as Rosa. His sense of personal responsibility being his only security, a thin security blanketing a barely restrained despair.

Rosa's own despair is unleashed when she finally does reach Chicago. This section is the high point of the film. In the way it subjectively depicts an urban landscape as an even greater instrument of compartmentalizing individuals than Rosa Moline's small town, Vidor is able to update The Crowd's criticism of urban society as a net of homogeneity to the more familiar post-war noir landscape. Rosa discovers that her charms and ingenuity, so overpowering in her small town, are subject to competitions from forces and distractions greater than she can command. Where manipulating her husband and his friend to meet with Lattimer was child's play, in Chicago she is unable to meet or phone the man. Lattimer's secretary keeps Rosa rooted in the waiting room.

She becomes one of the many aspects of Lattimer's life that he juggles and sets aside until he is most convenient to deal with it. When Rosa finally does barge in and confronts Lattimer's secretary, she is stymied to be told that he left through his private exit. Rosa Moline, provincial adulteress, is defeated and at a loss in Chicago. Vidor is able to telescope the completely pitiable sense of desiccation undergone by the character in a simple, long shot of Rosa walking away from the secretary's table down the corridor and into the elevator. Lattimer meets her later of course, to tell her that he's getting married to another girl. She runs out of the car and walks haphazardly into a club(where she's ejected for lacking an escort), she's mistaken for a streetwalker by a passerby and runs away from a police-officer. This hellish nightmare sequence ends when she bewails a taxi driver to take her back to the train station.

Humiliated, defeated and chastened, Rosa returns to Loyaltown in the pouring rain and returns to her husband's care. A conventional melodrama would end here. Now that Rosa is penitent, albeit out of disillusionment rather than remorse, she ought to buckle down, be a good wife and mother to her husband and become one of the community at last. A small, touching interlude reveals the hollowness of this reality as any genuine alternative. Rosa and Lewis watch lumberjacks at their work. The sounds of the woodcutting and the quickness with which the trees fall leads to Rosa to remark on the hollow longevity of trees, some of them having a mark that spells out, "it's your turn". Lewis says that with people, the mark could be death or any kind of ordeal. Rosa asks him if there is any such mark on her. When Lewis denies this, she reveals she is pregnant.

The range of emotions conveyed by Bette Davis in this scene, which presents Rosa at her softest and least contentious, allows Rosa to become a tragic figure. Especially when she replies "Not-glad and not-not-glad" in reply to Lewis asking her how she feels about it. She responds passively, with seeming hope, when Lewis promises that pregnancy would change her, make her a different person.

Rosa's brief flirtation with conformity ends when she meets Lattimer again. They resume their affair and Rosa decides to try and break away one last time. This relapse makes Rosa more ferocious and terrifying than before, her harshness becoming malign and self-destructive. Her character dissolves to a frightening spectacle of self-abnegation at the end of the film, Davis' performance sparing the audience none of the harshness and vitriol of the character. If James Cagney's Cody Jarrett in White Heat brought male angst and paranoia to its apocalyptic pitch, Davis' Rosa Moline implodes with the rage of her unfulfilled longings and passion, her vitality bursting till the very end.

*This piece was part of the "For the Love of Film Noir" Preservation Blog-A-Thon. Hosted by the Self-Styled Siren and Ferdy on Films. To aid the preservation and restoration of films such as Beyond the Forest, follow this link...

Late Style in TRIPLE AGENT

2010-12-15T04:35:00.000-08:00

“LALANNE: Have you seen his final films?

GODARD: Yes, on DVD. Triple Agent is a very strange film. I'm really into espionage, but I wouldn't have imagined that such a subject might interest him.”

- Les Inrockuptibles, (translated by Craig Keller)

"All my films are spy films in a sense. They all deal with characters spying on others or being suspicious of others."

- Eric Rohmer

One way is to look at the late works of a major artist’s career is to see it as its culmination. The artist, at the peak of his talent, examining as well as refining to its final shape, the craft and philosophy of his métier; re-examining well-honed themes with a wealth of experience, personal as well as historical. The crucial example is perhaps John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, set entirely in sets and interiors (acknowledged by Ford in a letter to Bosley Crowther as an atavism to his silent films); non-realistic casting of aging actors as types and icons more than flesh-and-blood characters and a poetic examination of the transformation from wilderness-to-civilization, and by extension the Western genre itself. Along with this is the temptation of seeing the late work as a fount of serenity and a promise of wisdom at the end of a long life. The other way to see the late work, examined at some length by Edward Said, is to perceive an artist, free from commercial considerations and indifferent to social tastes, confronting the contradictions at the center of his oeuvre without any attempt or promise of resolution.

Before The Lady and the Duke, Rohmer’s period outings were box-office failures. His sole previous non-contemporary films were made back to back after the completion of Six Moral Tales (the first of his film series). Die Marquise von O… and Perceval le Gallois were highly stylized literary adaptations. His final film, Les amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, completes this cycle. The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent on the other hand, despite its period grounding and the stylization of the former’s use of digital effects, are markedly different in the detailed historical milieu in which the story is set and which Rohmer brings to life in his mise-en-scene.

These films differ too from each other in the approach to history. The Lady and the Duke adopts the journals of Grace Elliot (Lucy Russell) as its spine and remains at all times within her subjectivity, her experiences and purview of things. Triple Agent, though set in a far more recent period of history, has no such detailed documents to offer. The facts of the original case proliferate in enough missing information to befuddle the likes of Borges. Rohmer evokes the implications of the dark, shocking story of Nikolai Skoblin and his wife, by focusing on their marriage. The single complication of this happy and contented marriage is the period in which the story is set and the specific occupation of the husband. The wife’s background and occupation, her Greek origin and profession as a painter, is a major departure from the original story. “A beautiful, sensitive, touching woman, a foreigner borne on the tide of History,” says Rohmer, “I feel very comfortable with this character.”

Aside from two crucial and carefully staged scenes at the beginning and towards the end of the film, there are no scenes of Fyodor Voronin(Serge Renko) outside the viewpoint of his wife Arsinoe(Katerina Didaskalou). With regards to the actual nature of the plot, Rohmer lets us know only as much as Arsinoe learns and knows. Yet Rohmer also situates another viewpoint over that of Arsinoe and that is the actual reportage of the newsreels. Rohmer daringly uses nine excerpts, carefully edited and cut, to structure his film. The newsreels serve the same relation to Triple Agent, as the Grace Elliot’s journal does to the previous film. It tethers the film to actuality. The narrative of the Voronin couple unfolds from May 1936 to September 1937, succeeded with a brief, stark epilogue concluding the action at 1943 in the middle of the Nazi Occupation. Title cards tally the years and months of the action of the story.

Rohmer’s use of these newsreels covers greater ground than mere period dressing. These newsreels are obvious public records created for the public of its own period, serving today as a record of its time. Rohmer, who was 17 when the Skoblin affair occurred, must have known these newsreels as do the characters of his film. A newsreel depicting a bombing of a factory cuts to Russian émigrés discuss theories of conspiracies on the perpetrators of the bombing. A conversation about Picasso’s mural for the World Expo of 1937 cuts to a newsreel showing the highly politicized event. The newsreels evoke the period as the characters lived through it as well as the way the contemporary audience will perceive it at one and the same time. The Nazi and Soviet pavilions reek of kitsch, the deadpan coverage of these monstrosities makes lampoon irrelevant. The audience benefitting with the hindsight of the eventual collapse of these entities can afford a wry smile that faded when Rohmer lingers to a shot of the Nazi flag fluttering against the Eiffel tower. Even more so in the scenes covering the Spanish pavilion. Rohmer preserves from the reportage, a haunting lateral pan of Picasso’s Guernica. The newsreel shows the painting as it appeared then, a new urgent work by the most innovative of all painters, freeing it from the baggage of international artistic treasure it has carried since then.

Rohmer’s double perspective evoking life as the characters live it and history as we know from hindsight, allows him to evoke the special mystery at the heart of the film as well as chip his two bits for historical speculation. Arsinoe, as the sole sincere apolitical character in the film, listens at the beginning in silence as Fyodor delights his embassy with his insight into the rise of the Popular Front and the implications of Stalin’s condoning of the cross-partisan affiliation of communists, socialists, middle-class liberals and Catholics. She grows progressively more curious in each public display of her husband’s dizzying display of his keen political acumen, which despite his essential dubiousness, contains keen insight that we cannot ignore. With his Dostoevskian name, Fyodor Alexandrovich Voronin cannot escape bearing with his intelligence, an arrogant appetite for performance, verbose monologues and pithy summations. When he describes to Arsinoe that he is a man behind the scenes, pulling strings, his wife asks on our behalf, “What strings?I know what you mean but how?”, he replies, ““That…is a trade secret. A state secret, even.” The firm, steely eyes of Voronin, at once the most talkative and enigmatic of spies, betrays no emotion, not even to the woman he loves. What can be perceived is a vain relish in his power for dissembling. The heart of the film is the extent to which Fyodor is capable of using it on his wife and to what extent will she resist it.

Fyodor promises to Arsinoe that he never lies to her and so avoids discussing his line of work at home. His concern for her health leads him to resettle to a rented country house of their wealthy friends. The main story of Triple Agent begins off-screen as do other key events of this film. It occurs in a casual conversation between Arsinoe and Maguy(Cyrielle Carrier), the wife of the patron lending them the house. She informs Arsinoe of rumours that her husband is a double agent on the pay of the Soviets. Arsinoe scoffs at that but she is speechless when informed that her husband was seen at Berlin entering the headquarters of Reinhard Heydrich. She responds defensively that he is in Brussels, the last postcard sent to her was marked there.

Voronin is outwardly a member of the White Russians Veterans Association. The White Army, of little obvious threat to Stalin, seems mostly to work as a cultural center for Tsarist exiles in France. Fyodor’s presence in the Third Reich and its dark implications mark the beginning of the erosion of her private space, which the newsreels depict in gradual escalation until the final erosion of the state of war. Arsinoe, owing to her marriage, experiences the consequences of events and choices made by agents of power through specific actions which she does not see nor comprehend. Fyodor weaves around him a tangle, establishing himself as the most politically astute and intelligent of the doddering relics left of the White Russians, all the while mulling over defecting to the Soviets at the same time maintaining his life and influence in France. Arsinoe’s discovery of his real activities creates a sense of desperation in his acts. Fyodor announces that he wishes to defect to the Soviets, being appalled by the vulgarity of the Nazis, he is shocked at her outbreak of happy tears. Her sense of peace is wavering thin, subjected as she is to the same torture Joan Fontaine is in Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

The moments which create the greatest ambiguity is the sequence of Dobrinsky’s kidnapping. Like every spy moment this one isn’t seen, we see details, we notice pieces that carry curious hints. In a scene where she is present but a conversation she does not hear, Fyodor converses with two gray haired men in Russian. As in the real case of General Miller, these gentlemen pose as Germans. The kidnapping scene is announced in a stark shot of Fyodor against the dressing table. He convinces Arsinoe to fix an appointment at the dressmaker, so that she would wear something different for a cocktail dinner. The most startling moment in the film occurs when Fyodor prevaricates and leaves Arsinoe alone at the shop. Arsinoe sits on a sofa and starts to read, a dressmaker moves past her. The decoupage of the film is arranged in direct cuts with no dissolves and fades which makes Rohmer’s use of the iris-effect startling, beautiful and elegant.

In the space between the iris fade-out and the iris fade-in, Dobrinsky is kidnapped and the Voronins fate is sealed.

Triple Agent which is set in the twentieth century, and a reflection on the twentieth century, ends in a completely desiccated final scene. Set in the midst of the Occupation, instead of the Liberation, Rohmer in his final period provides no sureties to the immense inscrutability of the human motivation at the centre of his story. The least political of the French New Wave auteurs crafts a film where politics are at the centre of every dialogue, movement and action, which seeps into and completely obliterates private life.

In the crucial final conversation between Fyodor(Serge Renko) and Arsinoe(Katerina Didaskalou), the dialogue, the direction and Renko’s performance particularly emphasize the use of the word “grotesque”. He describes the kidnapping of General Dobrinsky (Dimitri Rafalsky) and calls it a “grotesque” kidnapping. “Grotesque” applies in far greater measure to the final fate of Fyodor Voronin, (“a brilliant man”), and his “charming wife”.

“Is she still in prison?” asks the Gestapo officer at the end of the film.

“Non, elle est mort.”

A Few Movies I Saw At the Mumbai Film Festival...

2010-10-31T08:01:00.000-07:00

The Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) film festival offers a selection of the most interesting films in the world in the calendar year, along with a retrospective of old classics(this year an auteurist catalogue of key masterpieces of Japanese cinema from the 30s onwards). Given a time span of 7 days, scattered across 4 mutliplexes in different sides of the city, naturally every moviegoer has to pick and choose. Among the movies I was especially regretful to miss are David Fincher’s The Social Network, Mathieu Amalric’s On Tour, Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Mikio Naruse’s When A Woman Ascends the Stairs(which I had seen before but not on a 35mm print), the documentary Two in the Wave, Nagisa Oshima’s The Sun’s BurialThe Strange Case of Angelica.

So what did I finally see? Among others...

Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki)

The first screening I attended was on the 22^ndOctober. It was at PVR multiplex at Juhu (next to a single screen theatre Chandan which is the official hosting ground of the entire event). Branded to Kill was playing at Screen 5. Suzuki’s boundless invention in each frame was accepted with great cheer by the audience. No. 3’s(Jo Shishido’s) famous kill of an optometrist via a washbasin sinkhole (recreated in Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog) brought out an impressed silence and an appreciative applause.

Suzuki entered the production of Branded to Kill at the last moment, when the producers of Nikkatsu Studios deemed the script to be “inappropriate” despite setting a release date for the film. Given a low budget and creative freedom, Suzuki boldly ventured to create a film like nothing else. Goro Hanada is the number 3. hitman in the criminal underworld. Between hits, he’s like any man with a job. He’s married and so spends much time and hard-earned money satisfying his wife's shopping and sexual needs, he hangs out with his buddies and even finds a protégé(who gets killed early on). Relating the rest of the plot is a pointless exercise. What matters is the shift in tones, the juxtapositions of images and conceits. Suzuki layers competing ideas side-by-side, in the same shot, the same movement.

The serial-killer as existential hero achieved its apotheosis in three films made in the year 1967. Point Blank, Le Samourai and Branded to Kill. Of the three Branded to Kill is free of the humourless cold formalism of the first two and in its refusal to accord anything close to the tragic bearing Lee Marvin and Alain Delon achieve in their films, the most radical of the three.

The Story of the Late Chysanthemums(Kenji Mizoguchi)

Zangiku monogatari is for some people(such as myself) the toughest to admire of Mizoguchi’s masterpieces. One reason is the fact that the surviving prints of this film (released in 1939) has never been in the greatest of conditions. This adversity does not pose any obstacle in admiring the splendor of the film’s images; its carefully constructed staging of actions in extended moving takes, and especially the magnificently use of off-screen space to considerable dramatic effect.

The condition of the print doesn’t help us, however, in adjusting to the film’s unique rhythm and slow pace. On the big-screen with a relatively good print, supplied by The Japan Foundation, Mizoguchi’s film casts its spell. Zangiku monogatari is a bildungsroman of a pampered son of an acting dynasty. It charts his journeys, the hardships he passes through to finally attain the skill and accord of a great artist.

What’s visible and powerful in this film(one of Mizoguchi’s two or three best) is the emotions which, as in the films of Max Ophuls, suffuses even the slightest of calibrations of the camera. The suffocating world of privilege into which Kikunosuke (Shôtarô Hanayagi) is born into is rife with mendacity. Contempt is palpable in every gesture of abeyance directed, by his family and relatives, towards encouraging Kikunosuke’s acting hopes. The only person who is honest to Kikunosuke is Otoku(Kakuko Mori), a nanny of his cousin. They fall in love and leave together to pursue their destiny. For Kikunosukue, the pursuit is driven by romantic love and a need to define his identity. The painful irony is that the ultimate destiny of Kikunosuke(named after his ancestors) lies within his family, the system he sought to escape from, which Otoku comes to terms with and accepts long before he does. The devastating final moments of this film lingers for hours and days after leaving the theatre.

Bright Star (Jane Campion)

Mizoguchi's film is a story of love thwarted on account of a woman suffering out of her efforts to aid and nourish her artist-lover. The enemy in that film is mostly society and partly time. The enemy in Campion’s film is time, the brief years the couple knew each other. These years also mark Keats’ greatest period as a poet, achieving a plateau in his short life that most writers never reach despite greater age and experience. Maurice Pialat insisted that Van Gogh, his story of a doomed artist aimed to prove that the painter’s work was ultimately driven by a vision of beauty in his life, out of a love of life, which was even conveyed in his ultimate suicide.

John Keats, in Jane Campion’s film, lives a life haunted by death. The death of his brother Tom, the debts and deprivations he lives in, the neglect of his talent by the literary public. “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” he wrote in his Ode to a Nightingale(recited twice, as an excerpt in the film and then in its entirety over the credits). The looming presence of death does not make Keats morbid, nor is it a portent of his poetic endeavor, it is very much a real thing as is the love he shares for Fanny Brawne. As seen through Fanny Brawne’s perspective, John Keats comes off as very down to earth, very much the “least poetical man” self-described by Keats as the bearings of a real poet. The poetry is entirely in his words, it comes out of his brief existence.

As always in Jane Campion’s films the sensuality of the images, and the actor’s performances carry the real weight of the film, it’s one of her strongest recent efforts and very much a must-see on the big-screen.

Akitsu Springs (Kiju Yoshida)

Kiju Yoshida (credited as Yoshishige Yoshida in this film) was one of the banner film-makers of the self-styled New Wave promoted by Shochiku studios in the early 60s. David Desser notes in his book on 60s Japanese cinema (titled Eros + Massacre, after a Yoshida film of the same name) that the attempts by Shochiku to create an alternative kind of film-making within the system, rather than the film-makers themselves establishing alternatives outside the system led to inevitable tensions in the early careers of Oshima and Yoshida. Eventually both of them as well as others, made films under the Art Theatre Guild. Of Yoshida's Shochiku films, Akitsu Springs is the most well-known and admired.

Shot in colour and CinemaScope(the early scene on the train is especially powerful on the big screen), Akitsu Springs, has an ambivalent relation to the 50s melodramas of Ozu and Naruse, in particular the latter's Floating Clouds. Its narrative is charted against social, economic and film history. Yoshida looks at the characters critically, their feelings towards each other are presented with a retrospective awareness of the failure of a generation. Their feelings, at the beginning of their relationship is bright and passionate, yet as they move away from each other and as time passes, their passion becomes a memory of time passed.

The titular Akitsu Springs is the central location where the lovers encounter each other for more than ten years. The location is shown in different seasons, evoking pastoral idyll in the early years of Shinko(Mariko Okada who also produced the film and designed the terrific costumes) and Shusaku's(Hiroyuki Nagato) relationship and cold winter in its elegiac moments. The use of landscape and colour at times reflects the strife in the relationship but at other moments it serves as a counterpoint to their individual problems. The final moments of the film, a remarkably edited and timed denouement, takes place in bright sunlight, completely at odds with the tragedy of the scene.

Immortal Love (Keisuke Kinoshita)

With all due respect to partisans of Seijun Suzuki, the strangest and weirdest of the films on offer at the film festival is this shocking film by Keisuke Kinoshita, starring Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai. I haven’t seen many of Kinoshita’s films, but his reputation as a maker of humanist message movies means that Immortal Love isn’t as well known as it should be. This is a film that’s unmerciful towards its characters and the audience. The story is about an anti-couple. She(Hideko Takamine) loved another who fought in the Manchurian conflict of the early 30s, a fellow farmer’s class citizen, while He(NakadaI), the son of a landowner came from the conflict crippled and in love with Her. On discovering her affections for someone else, someone beneath his class, he rapes her. She tries to commit suicide but is rescued by her brother, is married to her rapist and gives birth to their son from the attack. This plot, enough for a three hour movie, forms the prologue of a 103mins film. The film then goes on and shows what kind of marriage these two have, how they raise their children in a house of bitterness and disgust. The film divides itself into chapters and at the end of the chapters, a Brecht/Weill-esque ballad intones repeatedly Takamine’s anger and sense of injustice which she carries all her life.

The pace of this film is fast but the speed carries exhaustion. The tone of this film is deadpan but there aren’t any laughs at all. The film has one of the most jarring musical scores in film history, its Spanish guitar and percussion making this melodrama that spans nearly thirty years feel like science-fiction, not unlike Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)

Certified Copy played to a nearly full audience at the Chandan theatre, an old-fashioned movie auditorium. The old movie-screens permit the kind of audience participation celebrated around The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a nearly every day basis around commercial Hindi films. The relatively sophisticated audience still found time to clap and cheer Juliette Binoche’s name when it appeared on the credits and added a whistle on seeing “Un film par Abbas Kiarostami”.

Kiarostami had once stated that he would never leave Iran to make a film and he has done just that for Certified Copy. It’s a kind of film that’s easy to call serene and leisurely if it wasn’t so enigmatic. Juliette Binoche gives a wonderful comic performance as a married housewife and mother who juggles a smart-nosed son(similar to one of the early passengers in Ten), while finding time to pursue a visible attraction to a writer James Miller(Wiliam Shimell) who is in Arrezo, Italy(where she, her name is Elle, has lived for five years) for a book tour, his book of course has the same title as the film. The subject of the book-within-the-movie is for once worthy enough to pursue and publish in real life. As non-Italians, the landscape of Arezzo very rarely veers away from being a tourist space. The occasions it does, a hilarious conversation with a coffee-shop owner and Binoche in Italian, are few in this film. The couple are strangers in this film(Strangers is one of the many titles of one specific film by Roberto Rossellini, a key Kiarostami influence) and they form a connection but the overall experience is ambivalent as is the end of the film.

Some notes concerning KAIGENREI(1973)...

2010-03-06T04:17:00.000-08:00

Kiju Yoshida's Kaigenrei(Coup d'Etat) begins with an assassination. After the title and director's credit we enter the landscape of the film. The grabs below give a proper sense of the unusual camera angles that Yoshida employs in the opening scene and throughout the film. Unusual both in its expressiveness and its stark beauty. What it doesn't obviously provide is the sense of movement, the rhythm of the cutting from one fixed camera set-up to another which is part of the power of the film. The left-hand side of the opening shot is obscured by the roof of a house angling forwards. In the far distance we see two people greet and bow to each other and then walk in opposite direction. The old man(who we learn is Zenjiro Yasuda, the head of a corporation) walks forward into the background while the woman moves down the frame, to the position of the camera.

The very first cut of the film serves as a reverse shot to this long-shot. In the far left top corner we see a figure standing against the bare wall.

Another cut gives us a look at the character.

Asahi Heiho(Tsuji Kazunaga) embodies the serene majesty of the assassin. We see him and are positioned with him rather than his would-be victim, Yasuda. But Yoshida's framing dwarves him beneath or embeds him inside the structures around him. Yoshida's mise-en-scene is conceptually precise to maintain this even with the first close-up shot of the film.

After Asahi finishes his count-to-ten, he slips off his sandals and moves barefoot calmly at first and then with a war cry he rushes forwards towards his target. What little we see of the assassination is obscured by the roofs of the houses behind the wall. What we don't see is the fact that Asahi commits suicide after killing the old man. A suicide which he planned ritually and for which his sister is interrogated by the police. The film begins in effect with a prologue of the end of one story. The story of a radical who becomes an assassin and segues to the next story, that of his ideologue Kita Ikki.

We first see Kita Ikki (Rentaro Mikuni) in silhouette, his voice intoning prayers to the shrine which is the focus of his attention and concentration. The shrine is one of the visual tropes of the film. When we first see Kita in contemplation, we see him perfectly assured as the patriarch of his house. His voice sounds throughout the long corridor as his wife enters the room to inform him of his guests. As the film advances, Kita implodes or loses conrol of his role in the house and his own sense of identity. In one scene that reminds one of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, he decides to educate his son Daiki(who is in fact the son from his wife's prior marriage) about his family history and the necessity of being a revolutionary after he relates to his wife a dream he had about the emperor.

Although the film touches on in some detail about a famous failed coup d'etat in 30s Japan, a coup for which Kita served as an ideological influence, much of what we would expect in a film that attempts a dialogue with this kind of history is absent. There is little in the way of a grand narrative summation and exploration of the events leading towards it. (This is further hampered on account of the fact that I did not see this film with the most effective of english subtitles.) This is also not by any means a biopic of Kita Ikki, who just like the figures in the opening scene is often dwarved by the yawning surroundings.

In so far as there is a plot, it revolves around the preparations of the coup d'etat to which Kita is shown as an ambiguous and ambivalent influence. He comes across a soldier (Yazue Miyake) who gushes to him whether he is in fact Professor Kita Ikki and Ikki in turn takes him under his wing as a pupil. In Chris Fujiwara's interview with Yoshida, the director states that his initial idea was to tell Kita Ikki's story through the viewpoint of this figure entirely. In the final film, the young soldier serves as a character who surrogates for Kita's contradictory idea of rebellion and reforming the state to liberate the Emperor who is in fact the head of state. In some scenes he confesses to being a spy which Kita regards as guilt for his inability to following through with the sabotage mission given to him or the desperation of being a young man trying to impress his mentor.

When Kita is arrested in the end, he is led to a room where he finds his young protegee staring at him. We cut to a camera angle creating a series of semi-circles framing the exchange of gazes. Was the young soldier in fact a spy? Or did he lose his nerve in the face of the crackdown? Or perhaps did he assume the identity that Kita subconsciously expect him to take on. The irreconcilable idea of rebellion embodied by Kita is tied to what one character calls his masochism.

Yoshida's Kaigenrei is ultimately a film that is filled with a pervasive enigma, comparable to Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad though his film is all the more enigmatic on account of being set in a tangible socio-political reality dealing with real historic figures. The film doesn't look or feel like a period film despite the high degree of versimilitude in its handling of period detail and location. It's expressive black-and-white framings and geometrically inclined camera angles creates a landscape of the past every bit as fragmented and mysterious as the dystopian next milennium-Paris imagined by Godard in Alphaville.

'Run of the Arrow' (1957)

2010-02-15T08:04:00.000-08:00

"Perhaps his best movie is Run of the Arrow (1957): a story of longing, epic scenery and romantic music. Desire and violence are incarnated in some of the most beautiful erotic male nudes since the Renaissance – Indians, savage, strong and free. It starts “April 9, 1865” with the South’s surrender at Appomattox."

- Tag Gallagher

First we have a cheap, ugly RKO logo in colour(this is a 50s RKO film, post-Howard Hughes' rape of the most creative of the big 5 Hollywood studios). Then before anything else, we are inside the world of the film. Like all Fuller films, it does not begin it starts. The credits will come soon of course. The film begins in a long take. The camera pans slowly and deliberately from right to left, showing the remnants of a battlefield, one by one we come across small details. We come across a fallen corpse, his bag says C. S. A.

Titles form on the screen slowly in synch with the rhythm of the tracking shot...telling us inch by inch...

...the day...

...the date...
...the place...

..and then we are told the significance of this day. We got the hint from the the C. S. A. mark stitched into the bag. But the shot's not over. As slowly as it pans left, a horse moves in parallel across the trail of corpses and beneath the legend of the titles.

And right before the cut, we see the horse and its rider in side-profile. From the C. S. A. stitched on the dead soldier's bag to the U. S. branded on the black stallion's rear end. In between we have red-lettered legends that tell the audience the significance of this day. Significance imposed on the reality of the morning of the last day of the Great Civil War by layers of posterity. For the men who died on that morning, all latter-day significance was irrelevant, what mattered was their survival. The same is true for the exhausted Yankee soldier who droops on his saddle. The atmosphere around the opening scene is stark and primal. The legends on the screen specify the event but the landscape could be set on the Trojan plains of antiquity for all we know, save for the markers on the bag and the horse and the costumes.

After the credits, we see the surrender of General Lee to General Grant. We see it from the point of view of O'Meara(Rod Steiger). O'Meara is the Confederate soldier who shot the last bullet in the Civil War. His target was the drooping Yankee soldier on the black horse(Ralph Meerker who returns later on in the film). His bullet hit but not fatally and he brings the wounded soldier to a CSA medic tent wherein he observes the histroic surrender. As he witnesses the surrender, he takes aim with his rifle towards General Grant only to be held back by the medic in the tent where he's placed. It's a scene that is quintessential Fuller, whom Serge Daney perfectly described as "war correspondent and mad educator". Run of the Arrow explores one the most perplexing of all questions - What is America? and by extension What is an American? and of course "What makes a man wander?/What makes a man roam?/What makes a man leave bed and board/and turn his back on home?"

Fuller disliked most Westerns and his four films in that genre attack and deconstruct the genre from the ground-up. He had nothing but loathing for Jesse James and the myth-making and aggrandizing piled up by decades of pulp writers, so he made the best Jesse James film, I Shot Jesse James wherein the "dirty little coward" Robert Ford is elevated into a tragic hero worthy of Brutus and Judas; The Baron of Arizona concerns the manner in which a brazen conman converts a democractically governed state into a private feudal kingdom through the creation and manipulation of false documents. Forty Guns explores the twisted sexual politics of gunplay and cattle-ownership in black-and-white 'Scope. Run of the Arrow, the only one in colour(Technicolor to be precise), is both the most traditional and the most modern of the four films.

Steiger's O'Meara is from the Deep South but after the Civil War, he is too full of hatred to conform to the Union into which his people are being reluctantly accomadated into. So he goes West, to the land that has not yet become part of the Union. Along the way he comes across Walking Coyote(Jay C. Flippen, excellent). Walking Coyote is like O'Meara, a renegade who walked away from his land, his people, his tribe. He could have become chief of his Sioux clan except for the fact that - "I can't stomach politics!"

The key scene is when Walking Coyote and O'Meara rest under the night skies. It's a single take, a two-shot held for 2 and a half minutes.

In this exchange, a Christian White Confederate finds a common bond with a Sioux wanderer who became a Scout for the Union. They discuss music, love-songs, the possibilities of female companionship and then O'Meara asks Walking Coyote, "What does Sioux mean in your language?"/"It's a French word, means cutthroat". Coyote tells him that the Sioux which have many tribes used to be called Lakota until the Chippewas described them as "Sioux", cut-throat, to the French on account of their practise of cutting throats of their fallen enemies before scalping came into fashion. In Fuller's film, this historical evolution of ethnic identity becomes a moment where two renegades from their own tribes become comrades.

He rhymes this scene with a later exchange between Captain Clark(Brian Keith) and O'Meara. This starts as a medium shot before resting to where Clark and O'Meara are seated on a wooden table. This take extends to four minutes and 30seconds.

In his exchange with Captain Clark, who represents to him and the audience, the tolerance and virtues of the Union career soldier he lets forth his bitterness and angst at being a sore loser. Clark calls him out of his attempt of becoming a Sioux to vent his feelings for defeat :"You're not the only Johnny Red fighting a one-man war against the United States, you know? Some of them went down to South America."(John Ford of course made a film about one such figure in 1956, one year prior to Fuller's film)

It is in these two conversations which rhyme dialectically with each other that one finds the essence of the film and the essence of Fuller. The first one is about O'Meara's fascination with the romanticism of finding a new people, a new community and becoming one of them and the second one is the pragmatic consideration of the new reality of Post-Civil War America, where Lincoln's Union is fit for all. America is a land where people come to create new identities and find their own home. O'Meara fights the Civil War because of what he sees as Yankee tyranny of telling the South how to live their lives(the issue of slavery doesn't enter into his mind at all) whereas Captain Clark sees the United States' promise as being refreshed with Lee's surrender. With Walking Coyote, a fellow-renegade-from-his-own-people he shares the dream of being an individual, of charting out one's own course.

In Fuller's pessimistic examination of tribal identity, both of O'Meara's spiritual comrades die. Walking Coyote dies with nobility. When cornered by a gang of angry wild Sioux hunters, he initiates the Run of the Arrow; a ritual where condemned men may retain their lives if they can outrun, barefoot across the wild plains, their chasers armed with arrows. Old and overweight, Walking Coyote borrows some time for O'Meara to run ahead until he dies from exhaustion, his corpse catered over by a Sioux who wears Coyote's Union hat.

There's no heroism in Captain Clark's death. It happens suddenly without warning and with no immediate outcry from his unit until he falls off his horse with an arrow in his chest. In the wake of his death, Lt. Driscoll(Ralph Meeker) takes control of the unit. Driscoll, when he is introduced to us, turns out to be, logically enough in Fuller's dialectical use of rhymes and repititions, the Union soldier on the black horse in the pre-credits scene. In that scene, O'Meara shoots him with what turns out to be the last bullet of the Civil War inflicting what is a non-fatal wound which he then brings to the medic thereby saving Driscoll's life. Driscoll is a "frustrated Custer" as per Captain Clark's opinion. While the Army wants to negotiate with the Sioux so that they can make a Fort in a reasonably alloted plot of land, Driscoll wants to charge on and plunder the field and give the "injuns" a piece of his mind. Upon Clark's death, he does just that. (If this turn in the story seems overly familiar it's because James Cameron stretched the plot of the third section of Fuller's 85 minute epic to the entirety of a 3hour 3D science fiction film currently playing in theatres). The death of Clark, the ascension of Driscoll allows for a bloodbath-in-the-making.

Yet as he has always has done all his life, Fuller surprises us. It's not as we would expect, a denouement where the evil Driscoll leads a massacre charge against the persecuted Sioux who have a right to defend themselves and we are allowed to identify with the persecuted people in their battle against the bad guys. It's Driscoll and his fort that is attacked. And it takes the point of view of the bad guy. After a montage showing the construction of the Fort over land not alloted in the negotations, O'Meara enters the Fort under a white flag and urges Driscoll to see reason and leave the Fort. Driscoll doesn't, he knocks out O'Meara but before anything else, the Fort is attacked. For the final battle, the ostensible hero of the film is unconscious lying beneath a heap of corpses. The violence that ensues is in its intensity and rhythm with few parallels in Westerns.

Even if the Sioux are right and the army is wrong, the sheer chaos and insanity of the battlefield is what registers over and above the ethnic and group conflicts. When the film cuts to O'Meara's point of view through his bleary eyes, we see shaky images that we understand reminds O'Meara of the earlier war he had fought. The film comes full circle when after the slaughter, Driscoll is tied around a pole and for his insults to the Sioux people he has to be skinned alive before everybody else.

The Sioux warrior bearing the knife intones to Driscoll, "I saved your life for this ceremony!" But as the cross-cutting with O'Meara turning his eyes away from the screams of Driscoll indicate, he's speaking for O'Meara.

O'Meara shot Driscoll with the last bullet of the Civil War only to take him to a medic and save his life. The bullet which was gifted to him as a souvenir is tied around his neck.

In the exquisite cutting of the scene, we watch O'Meara slowly loading his rifle as Driscoll continues screaming. Chief Blue Buffallo(Charles Bronson) watches this but does not stop him perhaps because he understands that this action performed by O'Meara is the key ritual of the entire film, the one where he truly defines his identity.

He fires and kills Driscoll out of mercy, the bullet-which-missed at last entering Driscoll's thick skull.

By performing this action, O'Meara has cast himself out of his new community, the Sioux. Once again, O'Meara has to leave his new family and his new identity behind, he leaves with his Sioux wife, Yellow Mocassin(Sarita Montiel, dubbed by Angie Dickinson) and their adopted son Silent Tongue(Billy Miller). But he parts ways with the Sioux in friendship and accompanies the survivors of the massacre back to their army camp. A better way of parting than he recieved at the end of the Civil War. That's the small hope that Fuller finds in this otherwise brutally violent and pessimistic film. One doesn't walk away with all the answers but one leaves without asking the wrong questions and think about the troubling unanswerable ones.

* This piece was written as part of the online Film Preservation Blog-A-Thon which began on the 14th of February and ends today. The Self-Styled Siren is one of the hosts of this event and if you wish to help in the restoration of rare, neglected films such as this one(which was released on DVD in the UK, though now out-of print) or others just like it, then...proceed here... I had contributed earlier to the event with a piece on two of Walsh's best films. Among the films which I would like to see restored and re-issued(it's presently available on TCM channel's broadcasts) is Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, on which I wrote about last year.

Walsh and Friends

2010-02-13T04:04:00.000-08:00

Which movies do people mean when they say, "they don't make 'em like they used to"? Among the old films, that is to say the classical Hollywood films, there are some film-makers whose works have retained a vogue. Their films have a certain feeling for modern life that touches audiences as directly as they did in their first runs. One thinks of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan and Howard Hawks. Then there are those film-makers whose works have a cult appeal like the westerns of Anthony Mann, the crime films of Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, the RKO horror films of Val Lewton, Vincente Minnelli's musicals or Sirk's 50s colour melodramas. Then of course there are international treasures such as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.

Where does this leave a film-maker by the name of Raoul Walsh?

Walsh is known and admired for his crime films - The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and of course, White Heat. A masterpiece like The Strawberry Blonde, starring James Cagney, Olivia DeHavilland and a Rita Hayworth-before-she-became-Rita Hayworth; while still little known is at least available via the Warner Archive stable and its cast is sure to attract attention.Just last year, The Man I Love one of the greatest films about the immediate post-war American society was made available and the response to the film has been good. There are his silent films, like Regeneration - an early post-Musketeers of Pig Alley-pre-Scarface gangster film and then the first The Thief of Bagdad. Unfortunately many films are lost, including The Honor System which John Ford ranked as one of his favourite films.

Me and My Gal and The Bowery were made in the space of two years, 1932-1933, a significant period in American film history. The early sound pre-code period was not as we were led to believe by early historians a period where cinema stagnated due to the influx of theatrical-minded writers of the East Coast, it was also a period where film-makers jumped at the chance to let audiences hear how Americans actually talked and through that how they behaved and lives with one another. These films are all about the love of language, of saying things for the first time and this is reflected in the vitality of the rhythm of these two films. In Walsh's films one gets the feeling of invention, that he is making films like it was in the old American Biograph days. Walsh of course was there, he learnt it all from the "Old Man" himself.

In Me and My Gal, listen to the casual off-hand manner of Spencer Tracy's waterfront cop Danny Dolan in his conversation with a stevedore.

Frank talks about the new Pagliacci production at the Metropolitan Opera. Danny says that he was thinking of going to see a burlesque show(pronounced bur-le-cue show) himself. They then talk about the Depression as Frank reads about the latest left-opiniated writer's rant against the breakdown of the capitalist economy. Frank agrees. In the background of course we see a great crowd of people engaged in making the waterfront function. Walsh's film is arranged in a series of vignettes about Danny's interactions with the people in his beat. An Irish-American peasant, he approaches people without any pretentions of authority and interprets his position as a keeper-of-peace with devilish amusement. When a drunk approaches him, Danny regards him with the same amusement as Bogart and Co. do Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not. Then we see kids play a game. One of them hits a ball straight into a glass window and there's a fight between them as to who did it. When Danny approaches them, he asks one of them, "You think you can take him out?" and lets the fighting continue as before.

Then of course Danny walks into a bar...

At the counter is Helen Riley(Joan Bennett). Danny again finds the same drunk he accosted earlier sitting at the table at the right edge of the frame. He then moves to the counter and buys some bread. He then turns to the register.

Danny - Hiya, red. Here's half a buck!
Helen - Yeah, I know what it is. And my name's not red...and besides my hair is blonde.
Danny - Well whatever you are, you have very beautiful hair!

The way the actors move in the frame, the way they interact and the delivery of the lines in a Walsh film is what creates his special magic. The same can be glimpsed in The Strawberry Blonde in the relationship between James Cagney and Olivia DeHavilland. That is the heart of Walsh's films. As Tag Gallagher notes, in a characteristically astute and intellectually passionate examination of Walsh, his cinema is interactive. The working class New York waterfront of this film becomes in the course of the film a place of which we retain memories. And Danny and Helen become in the course of the film a bunch of regular pals. And of course the film also finds time to invent the heist film genre along the way courtesy of the gangster ex-boyfriend(George Walsh, Raoul's younger brother) who raids a bank.

The Bowery was made in 1933, the same year as Sailor's Luck(which I haven't seen). It's protagonist is Chuck Connors(Wallace Beery), who runs his own bar in ''The Bowery'', a New York district known for ethnic strife. The film is set in the "Gay 90s" and the film after a dull title card plunges us straight into the days of old.

Needless to say, today's audiences won't appreciate The Bowery for what it is, a nostalgic reverie of Walsh's childhood in an Irish-American ghetto. It's hard for today's society of ethno-social correctness to share the film's fascination for a society as brazenly racist, sexist and violent as the one on display in this film. It's a work of urban folklore that very few American films have touched on or revisited. After this there was of course Samuel Fuller's Park Row which was set in roughly the same period and revolved around the early days of journalism. Then of course there's Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York which directly "quotes" the most famous scene of this film. The heroes of The Bowery are two brutal rivals - Chuck Connors(Wallace Beery) and Steve Brodie(George Raft). Neither actor were ever better. Like many Walsh characters, they are fabulists, fibbers and performers. In the case of Chuck, he's an old-time kingpin of the street. He shelters the orphaned and abandoned of the street and takes them under his wing. He's a local hero. But he'll be superseded by Brodie.

The way both of them fight and maintain their hold is through spectacle. In a boxing-match between both of their respective gangs, Brodie wins by secretly slipping in real-life boxing hero John L. Sullivan(George Walsh, the brother again) to defeat Connors unwitting chump. Then Brodie decides to one-up everyone by faking a jump off the Brooklyn Bridge(Brodie is a real figure who apparently did gain infamy for doing this). Of course when the time comes, he has no chance to back out. So he'll have to jump for real. The Bowery is about a world, a culture with all its flaws that will be wiped away and the gutter feudalities of the two heroes will go with it. The world of The Bowery is one where the characters are trapped in self-made myths, and self-told tales.

In both these films, Walsh creates whole worlds filled with people. In one case, the people of the present day New York and in the other, the New York of his childhood, as nostalgic and inaccurate as it always is. And the creation of this world has the same spirit of discovery as in the early Griffith films because now it's wedded to a personal aesthetic and viewpoint. Walsh was a fabulist to the core, an adventurer who at the age of 15 travelled and drifted far until he came across Griffith and became a film-maker. He started as an actor until a jackrabbit jumped through his car window destroying his right eye(this incident is homaged in High Sierra).

Both The Bowery and Me and My Gal(among other Walsh films) are films filled with a spirit of invention and discovery. In that sense, it's not the kind that's made anymore. Not in terms of subject matter but in the approach of the film-maker to his actors and through them his audience. This makes it all the more necessary for a film such as this to be restored and re-issued. It's a cinema of excellent craftsmanship, great performances and wonderful dialogue. It's also a cinema in the spirit of fun and adventure. In today's world, you don't often feel the people who made it had any fun making it, with Walsh at his best, you always do.

So if you'd like to ensure that films such as these ones by Walsh and others just like it can be seen around the world then...proceed here...

The Lonely Double-Zeros : Ten Favourite Films of the Decade

2010-01-01T05:38:00.000-08:00

The New Year has arrived. Over a hundred years ago, the first ten years of the 19^th century culminated in a period that came to be known as “La belle époque”. As Jean Renoir says in his final film, Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir, of course it had its intolerance, its cruelty but, “I like it!” admits the great man. The first decade of what became mythologized, even during its first quarter, as “the 20^th Century” was mostly a holdover of the “Gay 90s” of 1890-1899, the imperial powers still ruled the roost, their colonies remained under control but the calm either implodes on it blows up. The decade that will come will see centennial anniversaries of such unprecedented events as the Great War (as it would be known for a few decades), the Russian Revolution, the Easter Rising, the end of the Manchu dynasty in China, and the forming of the League of Nations. We will also celebrate hundred years of D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley, The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, True Heart Susie, Way Down East, hundred years since Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, came into movies. That is to say the hundred year anniversary of the beginning of the classical period of film history, which began with this decade and would stretch till the early 60s.

The first ten years of the new century, hopefully, will be called, “La mal époque”, a period of deranged political strife, and the complete collapse of moral order in the world today. I use the word “hopefully” in the naïve logic that where in the 20^th Century, the period of calm with which it commenced was mostly a self-fostered illusion that was promptly shattered by the myriad bloodbaths of the succeeding forty years; the period of violence with which the new century begins will hopefully be followed by an age of restoration, rational discourse and flexible interaction. This is the hope that one can gather from the appendix of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the use of the past tense has let some people, Thomas Pynchon amongst others, to argue that the book is a text from a distant period of the future that narrates how bad the period of the novel’s narrative is, for future generations. 1984 has come and gone and while political correctness is scarily like newspeak, one cannot say that our world of human relations bears direct relationship to Orwell’s paranoid nightmare projection of Cold War(a moniker he invented) divisions. Judi Dench’s M in Casino Royale, laments the passing of the Cold War as if it were the belle époque. The world today is more complicated and more divided than the one in the immediate post-war world.

(The New York skyline with the real towers as seen at the end of Gangs of New York)

As Jean Renoir noted in the final chapter of his memoirs – “With the development of new means of communication we are back in the state of horizontal compartments, just as in the Middle Ages the Western world was united by the Latin language and Christianity. Our present-day religion is the bank, and our language is publicity. The key-word is output, by which we produce more. When the world market is saturated we start another war to get new customers. The aim of warfare is no longer conquest but construction. When the building is destroyed the wheels turn again. We build skyscrapers on the ruins of pagodas, and this fills the belly of the working-man, who would otherwise revolt.”

On that note, the best films of the last ten years.

Yi Yi/A One and A Two (2000), directed by Edward Yang

‘The characters in "Yi Yi" live in a world that would be much the same in Toronto, London, Bombay, Sydney; in their economic class, in their jobs, culture is established by corporations, real estate, fast food and the media, not by tradition. NJ and Yang-Yang eat at McDonald's, and other characters meet in a Taipei restaurant named New York Bagels.’ – Roger Ebert

Edward Yang passed away in 2007. He made a mere seven films, but as in the case of Jacques Tati, that was enough for him to join the ranks of the great masters. Yi Yi, his last film was the closest he ever got to the mainstream. For years, he was “the other guy” of the Taiwanese New Wave, overshadowed by the far more prolific Hou Hsiao-Hsien(who was cast in Yang’s Taipei Story). Yi Yi, released in the year 2000, was named the best film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics. Yi Yi is often considered in the realm of the Altmanesque ensemble film and it is similarly accomplished in the editing and juxtaposition of the multiple storytelling arcs and the poetic associations and connections created through the cutting, as well as a keen awareness of urban topography as displayed by the auteur of Short Cuts and The Long Goodbye but Yang’s neo-modernist seriousness is on a different wavelength than Altman’s post-modernist expansiveness. Yang seeks to define nothing less than the experience of living in cities today, especially the experience of living in a traditional family in a modernist consumerist landscape. Mr. Ota(Issey Ogata) tells N-J(Wu Nien-Jen) that every day is new, and each moment is a new experience but “we are always afraid of the first time”. Yang shows that the reason for this fear is the myriad repetitive patterns human society falls into - whether it is our love lives, or in our conversations with our loved ones, we often have little to say or little we can do different. At the end of the film, the characters return right back to square one, the exception is the young child of the family Yang-Yang(Jonathan Chang) who notes that when he sees his newborn cousin, “I feel old too”.

L’anglaise et le duc/The Lady and the Duke (2001) by Eric Rohmer.

Eric Rohmer made two period films in the 70s. Perceval le Gallois, an anti-naturalist rendition of the Arthurian chronicle by Chrétien de Troyes and Die Marquise von O…, the adaptation of the Heinrich von Kleist novella of the same name. Since the box-office failure of these films, he has remained a film-maker of the contemporary urban world. In this decade, he has made three features, all of them period films. One reason he cited is that he is unable to write modern French dialogue on account of the decline in the quality of spoken French today. Dialogue, the spoken word are central concerns in The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent. The former film is based on the real-life memoirs of Grace Elliot(Lucy Russell), a Scottish noblewoman who lived in France during the revolution, a former mistress and friend of the Duc d’Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfuss). Rohmer is astute and intelligent enough to remain with the point-of-view of Grace Elliot whose presence as an outsider in a changed world is shown objectively, as a foreigner she is spared the violence of the Revolution on account of her nationality but is allowed to witness it and record it, thereby making her the perfect subject for Rohmer. Rohmer, who is a realist, re-creates Paris during the revolution as it really was, by inserting his characters into painted landscapes with the use of digital technology. More than Fellini Satyricon or Barry Lyndon, this film treats historical recreation like it was science-fiction and its use of special effects makes George Lucas’ work in the Star Wars prequels look positively shambolic.

Je rentre à la maison/I’m Going Home! (2001)- Manoel de Oliveira

“The nation, as we now know it, is an invention of the French Revolution. Men who had been merely subjects were raised to the rank of citizens. Systems crumble slowly…The nation is like an outworn house, but we like it and prefer it to a more modern dwelling…Yes, the nation was a pleasant thing. It was the widow of the local grocer’s shop…the song of the house-painter reaching us through the leaves of chestnut trees. It is the hair of a beloved woman, the caress of a family pet. A very pleasant thing, but it is dying, and we cannot bring the dead to life.” – Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films.

Manoel de Oliveira knows a lot about death of course. He has outlived many people in his one hundred and one years of existence. It was not until he turned eighty that his output became prolific and as the greatest active film-maker in the world today, he represents many things - A figure of inspiration whose example makes us less afraid of growing old and as an artist who like Manny Farber’s termite, is entirely devoted to “eating away the boundaries of his own art”. That is to say that Oliveira has refused to accept or take on the mantle of the Grand Old Auteur of Europe that his great age and quality allows people to readily cast him as. His A Talking Picture, is a harsh “goodbye to all that” to the good and the old Occidental civilization. A civilization that Oliveira loves, whose best qualities his cinema represents and whose decline he chronicles dispassionately. In I’m Going Home! he chronicles the story of a grand thespian (Michel Piccoli) who struggles with his life and his career after the death of his loved ones in a car accident. He still has his grandson for company of course. But even then the civilization is routinely putting him through more and more hoops and traps be it a role in a cop film or as Buck Mulligan in a weird-as-hell adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. Oliveira is harsh in his dismissal of modern life with it’s synthetically made fish food(as he describes in the interview on the Artifical Eye DVD) and the inability of the increasingly stagnant civilization to find avenues of rebirth.

Xiao cheng zhi chun/Springtime in a Small Town (2002) – Tian Zhuangzhuang

Rebirth is a theme of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s exquisite chamber piece. Tian was part of the Fifth-Generation of Chinese Cinema. Where Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige got the awards and prizes, Zhuangzhuang got the controversies and suffered marginalization from the Bosses. The Horse Thief which was made in the 80s(it impressed Scorsese enough to call it the best film of the 90s since that was when he saw it and he didn’t think any new film was as good) was poorly distributed and released with a tacky title card that set the film in Pre-Invasion Tibet(when Tian made this film for the people of the 21st Century). The Blue Kite got him banned from film-making. His first film made after this ban was a remake of a 1948 classic by Fei Mu. I haven’t seen the original but Tian’s remake is a major film in every way. The mise-en-scene of the film where the interiors of the broken house as well as the landscapes around it form the perfect setting in which the characters deal with the pains of memory. Of love that was lost, of lives that could have been different from what they are. Yet the promise of starting over, of rebirth is too late because people are too set in their ways. Change is either too late or not enough to fill the void.

Gangs of New York (2002) – Martin Scorsese

If the nineties represented Martin Scorsese’s most consistent period, the Double Zero decade is a period of uncertainty that hearkens to the troubles he faced in the 80s. Gangs of New York is the only great film he made this decade. It’s flawed, contains awkwardly cut expository scenes at the beginning of the film and never quite solves the dilemma between the operatic revenge story that serves the surface plot and the revisionist political mythmaking project it undertakes in the background. But after two viewings one can leave these obstacles at the door and relish the pleasure of a delirious fevered imagination, of film-making on a scale that probably won’t be seen for a long time or ever again. This is above all a despairing Great American Movie - A film about American history, ideals, myth in the tradition of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The larger than life universe of the characters, the sense of suffering and oppression accumulated over the years is vividly etched in this film.

The Company (2003) – Robert Altman

I had only seen Popeye as a young child before I saw Robert Altman’s appearance on the Academy Awards in 2006(he would die a few months later). Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin(who play singing sisters in his final film, the delightful A Prairie Home Companion) in one of the great Oscar moments, roast Altman by giving a live demonstration of “overlapping dialogue”, then Altman steps in and reveals that he has lived with a heart transplant these past few years. Over the following period of years I began seeing his films which is one of the great careers in American cinema. In this decade, he made the fantastic Gosford Park, Tanner on Tanner, a sequel to Tanner ’88 which is essentially a time capsule of the crisis of American politics of the last decade and a parody/ode to the burgeoning documentary cinema. My favourite is a film I saw for the first time on Boxing Day a few days ago. The Company is a film about the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. It stars Neve Campbell(who is a gifted ballet dancer, who also produced and co-wrote this film), a pre-stardom James Franco and Malcolm McDowell in a splendid cheeky role as the manipulative but canny artistic director of the company, less Boris Lermontov and more Jeffrey Cordova. This is also an ensemble piece but it’s far more quiet and moody than the cacophony of Nashville. The Company hearkens to the Depression era Busby Berkeley musicals in their celebration of performance as a solution to the problems of the “real world”, Malcolm McDowell is in the mode of the James Cagney/Warner Baxter impresario role. In Altman’s film, the real world is there every step of the way. Whether in the lack of time available in maintaining romantic relationships, the clash of bruised and hurt egos or the transient nature of the life of performance as well, this is a tribute to performance as a selfless calling. The mood of loneliness in the film often recalls Edward Hopper’s paintings especially the first meeting between Franco and Campbell in a bar as he watches the ballerina shoot pool.

Elephant (2003) – Gus Van Sant

In a first, the film won both the main award at Cannes and the director’s prize at the insistence of instant fan Patrice Chereau who recognized it as a major work. Elephant is simply greatest film about teenagers since Rebel Without A Cause and one bold, challenging American masterpiece.

Notre Musique - (2004) – Jean-Luc Godard

Notre Musique didn’t get much attention in the States. Philippe Garrel, among others consider it among the best and most major films of Godard’s career. Godard’s cinema is one that interrogates, with much humour, the functioning of images, the functioning of cinema itself. Notre Musique interrogates the ability to speak against conflict without resembling the side with which one is conflicting, in the hope, that “unlike Hawks I can understand that a woman is different from a man.”

Les amants réguliers/Regular Lovers – 2005 – Philippe Garrel

Garrel described his film about May ’68 as a B-Film to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. He used the same actor, his own son, Louis Garrel and used some of the same extras. His film of course is a wholly different thing. It aims to subscribe to the New Wave film policy that Vigo’s L’Atalante is the most beautiful film in the world whereas Bertolucci said the 60s were the coolest period in history. This austere portrait of disaffected youth and the collapse of utopian dreams from the 60s feels like a lived memory more than a period recreation. The use of black-and-white by the great William Lubtschansky enhances the immediacy as does the anachronistic use of This Time Tomorrow from Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One by The Kinks.

Of Time and the City – 2008 – Terence Davies

Terence Davies in this film and elsewhere mourns the fading of traditions and the passing of time. Yet by re-creating the Liverpool of his youth, by showing in detail the careful disintegration of the world of his often imperfect and tormented childhood, he recreates or rebuilds the bridges to the old traditions. Partly it’s through the use of the poetry excerpts in his voice-over, it’s also there in the amazing rhythmic editing of the archival footage mixed with the modern footage shot on digital. Of Time and the City returns the documentary form(which Davies notes is British in origin) to that of its roots, the great Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain. Hopefully England's finest active film-maker can get more films of the ground in the wake of this film's artistic success.

Christmas Blues : Leo McCarey's GOOD SAM(1948)

2009-12-25T04:35:00.000-08:00

“People don't always like to admit this, but holidays are often periods when lives become unmoored and destabilized … And it's important to bear in mind that it's both members of the marriage who become unmoored and destabilized, even though we see much more of the husband than we do of the wife. The Christmas trees and decor that we see everywhere only serve to underline the disequilibrium.”

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, in consideration of Eyes Wide Shut as an underrated Christmas film.

“Is he a good father?” asks Revered Daniel(Ray Collins), “Do his children suffer by his actions?”

“Oh no,” replies Lucille ‘Lou’ Clayton(Ann Sheridan), “He’s a good father all right!”

“Is he a good husband?”

“Well, he’s got a blonde from the store on our bed right now, if that’s what you mean!” She adds, “Oh no, no it’s perfectly harmless! She just tried to commit suicide, so he brought her in!”

Sam Clayton as played by Gary Cooper has a single major quality - his refusal to be afraid of being ridiculous. This strength is a necessary survival tool since his genuine compassion and consideration for his fellow citizens does not ennoble him as it does George Bailey (James Stewart in It’s A Wonderful Life!) or takes him to the tragic depths of modern sainthood (Ingrid Bergman’s Irene Girard in Europa ’51) or take him on a personal spiritual journey to derive meaning and purpose out of his existence (Takashi Shimura’s Watanabe-san in Ikiru). McCarey’s film is about the purpose and meaning of helping your fellow man on an everyday basis (which explains why the reconciliation and resolution at the end of the film lacks the heartfelt uplift of the Capra masterpiece.) Like these films, Good Sam explores a theme of post-war society, the isolation and compartmentalization of life to the point that genuine compassion and communal feeling seems difficult if not impossible.

Sam Clayton is a general manager at the H. C. Borden & Co. Department store. His earnest qualities make him an object of irritation for his boss and a talented salesman whose helpfulness garners a loyal clientele, whose decency also makes him a favourite among his colleagues. Sam earns well but lives beneath his means. He lives in a small house with cramped interiors with his wife and children in addition to houserooming his brother-in-law Claude who as a returning war veteran hasn’t yet fitted well into his civilian identity. In its amazing first half which is set almost entirely in the Claytons home, the film creates one of the most convincing domestic living spaces in American cinema. Good Sam is first and foremost a film about marriage about the small frictions that are part of such relationships. The first half of the film revolving around the domestic spaces of households, therefore also around Lucille Clayton(Ann Sheridan – her finest performance). She married a man who did not care to be ridiculous and so he doesn’t think twice of helping his fellow man. Lou Clayton on the other hand is critical and at times derisive about her husband’s goodness. One striking moment is in the opening Church sermon. Sam Clayton is asked to participate in carrying the round of collections. Lou is apprehensive and then resigned. Her children note brightly that their father is too tall to perform such a function. The manner in which this gag builds and plays out is a tribute to McCarey’s gifts as a master of comedic timing. The tone is even and restrained. The actors play their parts with great seriousness.

Sam passes the collection down the same row in which his family is seated. Lucille fixes him with a look of sardonic expectation. Then he passes down to the aisle and moves to the left of the frame. The camera tracks in softly as the Clayton family stare towards the altar in unison with the rest of the congregration.

Then without a cut-in, we observe the reactions of the children and the congregation to sounds in the background.

Lou Clayton of course knew what would happen and stares ahead beatifically, completely indifferent to the ruckus caused by her Sam. McCarey’s elegant touch allows him to create laughter out of a reaction shot to a gag, thereby doing away with any need of showing the gag itself. He repeats this again when in the following scene, Sam helps a comically henpecked couple by offering his vehicle. The expected mishap with the borrowed wheels happens offscreen with similar use of sound, the strategy in both cases inviting and insisting the spectator to identify with the sardonic good nature of Lou Clayton rather than Sam. Ann Sheridan’s performance creates a genuine portrait of a housewife whose chief quality is not just her capacity for nurturing and understanding but a quotidian practicality accumulated through constant burden of responsibilities of managing a house. Her chief hindrance in these matters is her husband who doesn’t think twice before parting away with his sole means of transportation to work and who is willing to fund a couple’s gas station so that they can have a baby even if saps into life savings his wife was keeping away for a bigger and more spacious house. If superficially the conflict of Good Sam is between altruistic and materialistic motives as Sam himself notes at one point than it is to McCarey’s credit that he creates ambivalence by making Lou the figure the audience is most at ease to identify with. She has more lines of dialogue than Gary Cooper (who it must be admitted is not the kind of actor who needs to talk a great deal) and we initially judge and view the target of her hostility and sarcasm through her eyes.

The small house in which the Claytons live in is too claustrophobic for poor Lou. Every time she and Sam make intimate gestures there is always sound from another room drifting into their space. The rooms are too near each other and privacy is all but gone from their lives. Their bedroom is also where their young daughter sleeps in.

The little girl watches in keen interest as her parents flirt effortlessly. When she makes her presence felt, Sam puts her to sleep behind the screen reading a hastily improvised version of Cinderella as he’s distracted by the sight of his wife in a nightie.

And who can blame him. Of course they are interrupted again - A girl who works at the Department store, a mistress cast aside by her wealthy boyfriend, turns up at Sam’s house after taking several sleeping pills. She turns up a Sam’s door after he counselled her about her depression. She is the blonde in her husband’s bed she describes to the Reverend. Her sole companion in these matters is Chloe (Louise Beavers, excellent), the black maid who helps her manage an overcrowded home and who shares the same exasperation of Sam Clayton’s zealous charitable quality.

As in The Reckless Moment, the level of shared work and responsibilities creates, up to a point, camaraderie between two women of different races.

The structure adopted by the film is the ways in which Lou Clayton sees and accepts her husband’s kind ways as superior to her selfish desires. This is made complicated because at the heart of Lou’s “selfishness” is a desire for her identity which she seeks to express in a space of her choosing – the new house which she wishes to use her savings to buy for Christmas, which also manifests briefly in a desire to return to her old job which would mean shifting to Europe. The latter practical option is clamped down by her husband while the former choice makes him uncomfortable. The new house which the Claytons visit is a spacious beautiful suburban home. Each room is maintained precisely and beautifully and it’s undoubtedly a great home to invite and host guests. In comparison to the Claytons smaller house though, it’s cold and isolated, lacking the noise of activity and life. Yet when Lou stands before the dressing table of the home, she says, “this is paradise!”

The whiteness of the surroundings and the light filling the room all but dares us to disagree. Especially cast in relief against the fade-in to the dressing room of the old house in the next shot. The new Clayton home is created out of living magazines rather than shared experiences and accumulated memories. It is a new house replacing an old home. The fact that this new home comes out of the repayment of one of many loans offered generously by Sam to the people who came to him for help over the years is especially ironic. And it is in this final movement of Good Sam that we come to identify with Sam himself.

His deadpan refusal to let life and society ridicule him are tested to the hilt when he is robbed of money he was carrying to the bank. He is robbed in a darkly comic gag by a waif girl, not very different from the store clerk who he brought to his home. Since he paid for the dinner of the employees with the money he would be spending on the house and since his repeated loan giving has made him a liable client from the bank, Sam can’t buy a new house. Unfortunately when he rushes home to tell his wife the bad news he finds out that his furniture has been sold to the Salvation Army.

The bank manager’s useless, almost mocking commiserating offer of a drink, “Well Sam…here’s hoping somehow you have a merry Christmas!” devolves into an absurd finale. Where in It's A Wonderful Life!, the events that drive George Bailey to contemplate suicide are painful and anguished, the finale of McCarey’s film denies such grandeur to Sam, seeing it merely as an inevitable obstacle that life would cast in his way. Lou meanwhile is all ready to establish her new home. She rehearses a special welcome with her children and Chloe.

Framed theatrically, it casts Lou as a director establishing her new home which is also the ideal suburban dream home of the middle class. It also drastically alters the dimensions in her relationships with the “cast” who sing an absurd ditty, “Now that we have a better home, we’ll be better too!”

Sam meanwhile is at an Irish pub run by Tom Moore(William Frawley) getting drunk under the aegis of the bartender. Cooper is astounding in his evocation of the annihilating oblivion that makes alcohol so attractive. The rapidity with which Good Sam descends into squalor is merely the other extreme end of his sobriety, his calm and gentle demeanour. The genuine companionship which Moore the Bartender provides him also makes his Christmas Day binge in keeping with the Holiday spirit. This is taken to the logical conclusion when a homeless bum enters the bar and provokes and questions Sam’s goodness, daring Sam to exchange clothes with him. Sam, in a drunken haze offers to find him a bed and returns to the bar wearing the bum’s clothes. Good Sam returns to the bar in shocking squalor, summoning up Franz Biberkopf in Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz as he resolves to be the meanest man in the world.

He proves it first by dislodging Frawley’s wig and then kicking up a tray of collections from a Salvation Army volunteer. In a remarkable moment, Frawley sings Sam to go home and he’s marched by the Salvation Army to his new home. In the meanwhile the usual mechanizations of the Hollywood finale have taken place unbeknownst to Sam. The bank manager taken by Sam’s generosity and good will agrees to loan the funds for the new house against his bank policy(in today’s economy, he could be killed for pulling such stunts). Lou, aggrieved that Sam believed that she valued her new home more than him is chastened and worried where he might be. Luckily the Salvation Army drums arrive and Sam is barely able to walk to the front porch. But he has it in him to strike up one more song. “Let me call you sweetheart…I’m in love with you.” Lou helps him with the words of the song, thrilled and exhausted that Sam has returned.

In Eyes Wide Shut, both members of the marriage are unmoored and destabilized even if as Rosenbaum says we see more of the husband than the wife. McCarey gives equal attention to both husband and wife in his film - where Sam is stable and moored in the beginning while Lou is tense and upset. At the end she is firm and stable while Sam is barely able to articulate his drunken proclamation of love, it is her identity that has prevailed over his. Success and social mobility have come Sam’s way. He does have a Merry Christmas indeed, only he’s too drunk to put two words together.

My Cinephile Story!

2009-11-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

It seems hardly a week goes by without me reading some article in the newspaper, the web or a blog talking about theatres and revival houses in the US and UK closing down or being threatened to close down. This has also spread to video stores and libraries for old films. Just yesterday, I read a piece on Karina Longworth's blog about Abel Ferrara attending an Anthology Films Archive screening of Bad Lieutenant. The screening was held as a fundraiser for a video store in Manhattan called Cinema Nolita, of which proud Abel is a regular patron of. In general there is discontent in the air about the usual venues and supplies of quality cinema(Old & New) drying up. People don't know where they're next regular dosage of serious cinema is coming from. The general mood is one of change for the worse.

Two weeks ago, something of a similar nature happened in my sphere. The British Council like Alliance Française and the Goethe-Institut is an organization that promotes British culture. It provides educational information to those who want to study in England and conduct tests of a similar accord. For me, it was a library. The first library I became a member of.

I joined the library four years ago. Then it still had videotapes and slowly, but cautiously, it began stocking a small supply of DVDs. I joined the library for educational reasons. It had the books and secondary sources needed for my majors. But right from the start I began abusing this privilege. For there in the corner was a stack of DVDs and my hands reached out to hold before my eyes registered it fully, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.

This is an exact citation of the DVD edition available at the BCL, Mumbai.

I had heard of Michael Powell from Martin Scorsese's championing of his films or second hand as an obscure British film-maker. But I would never have dreamt that I would have had a chance to see the films when I joined the BCL library. The DVD transfer wasn't the best of course but the film was still magnificent. Unlike anything that I had seen before. When I joined the library, I expected it to be stuffy, officious and that it's DVD shelves would be limited to Oscar-winning bores and Merchant-Ivory stable(although there was that too). But the DVD collection of the library offered a school into all the obscure classics of British films. It made it possible to see David Lean's Hobson's Choice and The Sound Barrier before the Dickens movies and Brief Encounter. The library was also non-parochial to extend the criteria of British films to include Hitchcock's American films, all of Chaplin's Short Films, films made in England by expats like Polanski or Antonioni and even American classics like His Girl Friday, On the Waterfront, The African Queen. It also included the great Ealing films, the Losey-Pinter films. And one absolute rarity...the restored, uncut version of Orson Welles' MacBeth.

It seems strange to use British films as a foundation stone for my burgeoning cinephilia but that's how things worked out. I would never have been able to see any of the Archers films - Peeping Tom, The Red Shoes, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going, A Matter of Life and Death and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp - had it not been for the BCL. The same goes for Welles' MacBeth or Terence Davies' The House of Mirth and Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Films which are unavaible on Bombay's TV screens, revival houses and in DVD stores. At best one can find VCDs in the wrong aspect ratio. Home Video never really took of in India as it did elsewhere. Most people would prefer seeing movies in the big screen over here. Only the kind of films that I read about and was interested in seeing was unavaible then. Things have changed slightly of course but it's still a long way away from creating spaces for showing films that might garner enough history to stir the collective mourning and outcry a place like Cinema Nolita, LACMA and others generate from its patrons. Leave alone a full scale strike as in the case of L'Affaire Langlois in the 1960s when cinephilia was attacked by the state and the state lost.

In the ensuing four years, the library expanded. It had a VHS collection(that included titles like Welles' The Trial, Julien Temple's Jean Vigo biopic) that was phased out and replaced by a DVD collection that is replenished on a monthly basis. Regular replenishment also saw fit to update the library's collection of film-related literature. Because of this collection, it happened that my withdrawals from the library had very little to do with my syllabus. Instead of Lives of the English Poets by Samuel Johnson, I would borrow David Robinson's biography of Chaplin, or maybe Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema or Bill Krohn's Hitchcock At Work or Sight and Sound readers collating essays from different areas. Then of course there was the collection of back issues of Sight and Sound magazines that was available for members perusal. The exception being the latest and newest issue of the magazine which was unshelved and for reading only in the library(until the month ended and you could take a butchered and cut up magazine, removing all the articles and leaving only the latest movie and DVD reviews). So it happened I became a cinephile.

The Library is located in the Colaba area far down the end from Nariman Point. This area entered the international spotlight as the general topographic centre of the terrorist attacks that struck Mumbai 11months and 364days ago, as of this writing. In the same area are the cultural centers of the Goethe-Institut, the Asiatic Library, the British Council Library, Alliance Française and the American Information Resource Centre. I saw a R. W. Fassbinder retrospective at the Goethe-Institut, I saw Visconti's Il Gattopardo projected on the wall of an antechamber at the Asiatic, I saw Hallelujah, Carmen Jones and Imitation of Life in the same day at the AIRC. The French, the land of cinephilia, took first prize for their regular monthly screenings and yearly retrospectives at the Alliance and their parochialism allowed for Antonioni screenings, Bunuel double bills, Youssef Chahine screenings, and a week of retrospective programming that included Ugetsu Monogatari, Sullivan's Travels and F For Fake This general period of movie screenings was opened up to me by my membership at the BCL.

From the first week of January next year, the physical library of the British Council will cease operations. It won't be open for it's members to peruse and browse at their leisure. It will shut down. The caveat is that it will shift permanently online. Books and DVDs and other items are now possible to be sent home within 48 hours of delivery. So gone is the surprise anyone would feel at discovering a Michael Powell forbidden classic on the shelves when one expected to find none. Gone too is leisurely exploration of Sight and Sound readers on the bottom shelves. Not to mention bizarre discoveries like the literal script of Alphaville stacked betwixt drama books(apparently someone believed it was made for the theatre). Now when everything is online, one must know exactly what one wants and has to trust in the all-encompassing reach of it's opac catalogue. When many of my discoveries happened outside this all-too-human program. But then there's still the French, they have Rohmer, Pialat, Godard, Renoir, Welles' Le Proces, Elaine May's Ishtar(my favourite buddy movie). The Americans have a ludicrous security check outside it's facility, all bags are passed through an x-ray conveyor belt, all cellphones are to be switched off(and this was well before last year's attacks) but where else can one read James Agee on Film, Who The Devil Made It and Why, Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movies as Politics, James Naremore's The Magic World of Orson Welles. But it marks the end of a brief but important period of my life.

CASSANDRA'S DREAM (2007, Woody Allen)

2009-11-21T06:44:00.000-08:00

It never occurred to me how hard it is to write a blog. Actually it did and I avoided starting one a long time. It’s not so much the effort of writing (I type endlessly on message boards, emails and blogposts, posts of great length, greater length cumulatively than the cumulative word count already catalogued herein). It’s just that when one is given the choice to create discussion, one does not always know what to write about. I have always been very repressed about writing about myself and am incapable of being directly self-revelatory about my life, my family and my friends. So it was a nice idea to write about films where I could sublimate my identity and my ideas behind the aesthetic and political values of a film or any other work of art. Then there is the question of writing intelligently and sensibly about cinema which is very, very difficult (and hence why the world needs good film critics). In short, it’s taken me time to update this blog since my last post. It wasn’t a question of time needed to write, or a case of writer’s block or confusion about what topic to deal with next. Just a lack of cultivation in regularly writing about films in the last few weeks.

Anyway, the film for discussion is Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream which is one of his best films and among the most misunderstood. When this film came out two years ago it received bad reviews of shocking vitriol. The general idea was that this film was an attempt to return to the style and tone of Match Point – English setting, class conflict, murder, meditations on morality. Film reviewers who see many, many films on a daily and weekly basis may have some excuses for this simplistic reduction of this film (which is actually quite different from Match Point) but is there any reason to say, as one critic does, that, “we have Cassandra's Dream, a movie that returns to the essence of Match Point like a dog to its vomit.” Those that displayed greater sanity, even the good critics, underrated the film. As such, this is a minority opinion(shared however by Richard Brody of the New Yorker, who I usually disagree with).

Cassandra’s Dream begins with the purchase of a boat. The boat is purchased by two brothers Terry(Colin Farrell) and Ian(Ewan McGregor). The Blaine Brothers (as Terry ironically dubs the duo later on in the film) christened the boat after a dog that won Terry a bet in the races. The name of the dog and the boat and the film is the same. The allusion to Greek myth however escapes the two brothers. Terry absurdly calls it "a lucky name."

The two of them as framed in the marina gate are trapped. They want to buy the boat because it is a good boat available at a reasonable price and they have fond memories of sailing this boat as a children in a boat with their Uncle Howard(Tom Wilkinson). But they don't have the money yet. However Terry reveals unexpected earnings from a recent betting spree at the dog races. The first act of the film is driven by Terry's brief spurt of gambling success. He wins at dog races, he wins 30, 000 pounds at a poker game. His luck allows Ian money to take his girlfriends to fancy dates. Luck as a concept and idée fixe is central to Match Point but Cassandra's Dream actually starts when the lucky spurt ends and the characters are socially cornered and trapped as a result.

Another idea introduced is the curious enigmatic role of Angela (Hayley Atwell). Ian borrows cars from his brother's garage(which apparently caters to rich motor enthusiasts) and seduces his girlfriends by giving them rides in exotic vehicles. Ian Blaine is the more ambitious and practical of the two brothers. He is intelligent, practical and smart. Terry drinks, takes pills and gambles. He's also very charming and likable. Ewan MacGregor's performance is excellent in part because he's able to portray Ian's charm at once as something real and effective and at another layer, a performance. Ian is charming and likable because he has to succeed in his investments and property deals. To seduce his girlfriends, who are usually working class, and the present one is in fact a waitress at his father's restaurant. He has to be charming to show that he is at once refined and accessible. So Ian's charm is at once functional and real. Catering to the demands of his audience and his needs.

This changes when he meets Angela on his latest romantic date.

She is an actress who moves in more refined circles. The circles that Ian believes he deserves. She's also very beautiful and the two of them "make a wonderful couple"(as one of Angela's friends observes). At the same time, she's also as ambitious as Ian, eager for success and exposure. Ian's obsession for Angela isn't the source of tension in the film but it is part of the texture of the film. In Woody Allen's films, characters are at once types, or symbolic representations and at the same time three dimensional believable characters. So Angela is both a "muse" who inspires Ian to drive further and faster up the ladder and a character who is trying to survive in the society she lives in. The final line of dialogue in this film where she and Terry's girlfriend Kate(a pre-Happy Go Lucky blonde Sally Hawkins) are out shopping and she encourages her to buy a white dress noting, "I wore something similar when Ian first saw me" rings with a strong force especially in relation to the brutal denouement with which Allen intercuts the scene with. In Woody Allen's film, the attraction at first sight is the beginning of the tragedy for the two brothers. This romance of course doesn't relate at all to the plot which begins only a quarter of the way into the film. The first act is devoted to showing the world of the Blaine Brothers.

Of the British films that Woody Allen has made, this one is the only one not to feature American actors. Some of the cast have acted as Americans in Hollywood movies of course and America (more precisely, California, Woody Allen's bête noir from Annie Hall) is a key offscreen presence. But the total immersion into London is less touristy than Match Point. The first act shows with great detail and use of colour (the star DP on this Woody Allen film is Vilmos Zsigmond) the milieu in which the Blaines live with their father(John Benfield) and mother (Clare Higgins). The father's business is a restaurant at which Ian works. The restaurant is struggling and his mother wastes little time in berating her husband about the fact that much of the money that pays the bills comes from her brother Howard who is a successful plastic surgeon who has recently opened a clinic in China.

At the heart of the film is two tense dining scenes. The first is the second scene of the film. The subjects of conversation has to do with the boat they have purchased, Ian's lack of value of money, why they even need a boat and of course Uncle Howard whose sister says, "Thank the Lord the man is a Prince." Allen is careful to frame this conversation by showing the lunch that they are eating in the frame.

The conversation about who puts money for the family and who in fact makes the food they are in the act of eating possible, and the conflict that results out of this imbalance in the family structure between parent and actual provider is stunningly evoked in this scene, the actors are totally connected to the roles, Zsigmond's use of colours is brilliant and the dialogue is sharp and precise. The film shows a family that is dysfunctional, the parents depend on their children and the children are dissatisfied by the options available to them from helping their parents. The mother gushes at how her brother Howard has never forgotten her despite his success and she talks about the unbreakable family bonds. For the brothers and for Allen, the Family is a trap, a prison ready to swallow up whole the children of the next generation for the survival of the previous. Yet the problem does not lie with their parents who are at least honest and understanding for their dilemma. The real monster is benevolence. Who they owe their money to, the man whose generosity they depend on. Howard's benevolence drives a wedge between husband and wife and divides sons from their father.

This is apparent in the second dining scene where Uncle Howard enters the screen. He takes them to Claridge's(an expensive restaurant) for his sister's birthday. Where the early dinner was open and frank about the family's resentment and grudges, this one is repressed and formal. The father is sardonic and checked in and Howard's princely demeanour dominates the space.

The conversation is also topical. China, where Howard has opened a clinic in, is a booming centre and "they are much more capitalistic than we are". The two brothers are quite and hopeful in their behaviour. They want something from Howard and wait for their cue. Howard then decides to have a talk with them alone.

In Crimes and Misdemeanors there was a striking moment of expressionism when Martin Landau's character has a symbolic exchange with the rabbi he is treating regarding the fact that he is considering killing his mistress. The scene where Uncle Howard shows his true colours is a similar moment, except it's taking place in a real place and is meant to be a real encounter. Yet there's nothing naturalistic about this moment. It's in fact completely theatrical in design. When Howard takes them to a dark leafy patch between trees and says, "I think you'll agree that family loyalty cuts both ways." If Hayley Atwell seems to be both muse and aspiring actress/socialite, Howard is Mephistophilian in design.

As played by Wilkinson, Howard is like Ian, a charming man who is likable and generous on the outside. He defines himself by apperances (like Martin Landau in Crimes and Misdemeanors). Even after Martin Burns(Philip Davis) falls out with him, he admits to keeping in touch with him socially("even if we both know what the score is"). When he asks for his favour of killing off one of his associates, he speaks hesitantly, reluctantly building slowly in intensity until he lashes out with surprising brutality(just as rain showers drapes their huddle beneath the trees) describing the compromises he has made for success and the fact that the Blaines need him for the success of their careers. He presents himself as a desperate man, full of fear of getting caught yet he knows that he has power over his nephews and exercises it with little hesitation and remorse. Scott Foundas in his perceptive(if dismissive) review of this film noted that the exact details of Howard's transgressions which causes his fallout with Martin Burns is unmentioned, noting that it posits Howard's wealth and success and position as being enough of an explanation. Yet it is only by Howard making this Faustian dilemma that Cassandra's Dream becomes one of Woody Allen's moral parables.

In the Greek tragedies, the conflict takes place in royal families and their conflicts become tragedies on a grand scale and style. There the motivating forces are the Gods, the glory of military service and the fate of the country. In Cassandra's Dream, it's money and all the rest are justifications. Ian says that he and Terry are no different from people who serve in military conflict, "If we were soldiers, we'd have to kill total strangers every day, all to profit politicians who are up to here in corruption!" Motivation becomes self-justification despite the truth of the proclamations. Ian has no problem with it, Howard is indifferent to it. The only person who has a problem is Terry whose drinking and pill taking seems not to drown his anxiety and moral qualms but amplify it. The irony intensifies when it turns out that the dim loser Terry is the one that comes up with the foolproof manner in which a murder can be committed without any trace of a crime scene. The idea is good enough to inspire actual murderers provided they are good at woodwork.

Colin Farrell's performance as Terry is one of the best efforts in all of Woody Allen's films which is saying a great deal. The abject degradation of Terry in the final act is striking because of how the character seems to want to control himself and the very attempt to control himself makes him unhinged. At the same time, Ian is finally on the verge of complete success. Angela commits herself to him, her parents like him and he has enough to buy his own posh car without having to rely on his garage. The only thing left to hold him back is his bond with Terry, who he loves and who can compromise him the most. One scene at a racetrack, after Terry has lost his job at the garage shows the divide between brothers in a way that's never been seen in movies.

Terry confesses his personal issues coping with stress and even his contemplation of suicide which Ian tries to defuse by trivializing it. Terry confesses to him because he has no one else to turn to, Ian handles him delicately out of love and self-interest, one inseperable from the other. It's a mutually suffocating and self-destructive relationship and the main reason is because they love each other in a world and society that is hostile to that kind of consideration. That makes them tragic in a way that the characters of Crimes and Misdemeanors or Match Point are not, in a way that no other character in Woody Allen's films are.

A great and beautiful moment in this film is the one single tender moment shared between the Blaine parents who otherwise are at each other's throats throughout the film. This moment takes place right before the pair murder Martin Burns, the hit ordered by their uncle.

"I dreamed about the boys last night," says the Father.

"Again?" she replies.

"When they were young," he finishes.

The cut after this medium shot to a two-shot of the brothers in the car is especially powerful.

It's a moment of deep sadness.