A Viewing List for Twenty-Thirteen
As promised, the second part of my no doubt interminably dull but
still very much obligatory "year in film" retrospective. This time, the list in question includes
films that I first saw (or returned to) between mid March and early June,
2013. Once again, plagiarisms of my
various "Key Film" comments will follow to some extent, but I'm also
using the opportunity to clean them up a little bit; to correct some of the
typographical errors (while no doubt adding a few new ones in the process). It's somewhat regrettable that this update has
taken so long to complete. Initially,
I'd hoped to have the whole thing done and dusted by the end of January, but it
now seems more realistic to expect the third and fourth parts to be completed by
early to mid February instead. There is
a genuine reason for this delay that goes beyond just regular laziness, but
I'll go into this in more detail at a later date.
For the titles that I hadn't
previously written about, my initial intention was to write a proper 'Key
Films-style' analysis of the work(s) below.
Unfortunately, I've since lost the notebook that contained most of my original
comments on the films and as a result was forced to reinvent some vague
obviations, mostly from the perspective of a hindsight rapidly fading. As such, many of these comments read as
anecdotal in nature and for this perhaps say more about me as a viewer than
they do about the films discussed.
Hopefully anyone reading this will find it in their heart to forgive me.
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Othon [Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub, 1970]:
Initial viewing, 15th of March, 2013.
'Othon' is the short-form title, taken from the 1664 text by the
French author and playwright Pierre Corneille, upon which the film is
based. More important to our
understanding of the film and its particular aesthetic is the unabridged title,
"The eyes will not close at all times, or maybe one day Rome will let
herself choose in turn." To look at
the title is to establish two significant points. The first, the concept of seeing; of being a
witness to the stories that resonate throughout history, played and replayed in
various contexts, both personal and political.
Second, the filmmaker's exact and exhausting use of language as it
pertains to the conception of the literary adaptation as something that uses
the spectre of the past to create commentary on the present. Both of these stylisations work to demystify
the idea of the historical drama, or even the literary adaptation itself;
liberating it from the fraudulent gloss of the Hollywood epic or the tedium of
social realism.
Throughout the film, Corneille's text is not adapted, but
spoken. Only by communicating the words
aloud can it be filmed, personified and made real; finding an expression, not
through the conventional (or whatever) manipulations required to condense the
plot into a series of significant set-pieces and events, but through the
meticulous delivery of the actors, who perform the play by speaking the words;
creating the sense of the narrative as rhetoric; the audience, not so much
viewers, in the traditional sense, but spectators; observers to the scene. This gives the film a theatrical quality, but
of a living theatre; the theatre of life.
The approach, where once again old words are placed into a contemporary
setting - suggesting the idea of the past as an echo, running parallel with the
present - pre-recalls the ideology of later films by Theodoros Angelopoulos,
such as The Hunters (1977) and Alexander the Great (1980). A notion of the past existing within the present - side by side - is
further suggested by the filmmakers' daring approach to the mise-en-scene, in
which the use of intentional anachronisms create the impression of the past and
present intruding, like fiction into reality.
As the ensuing drama unfolds, these actors in period costume -
posed like living statues among the rubble of Mont Palatin or within the grounds
of the Villa Doria Pamphili - recite their lines against the noise and
confusion of busy streets; the sights and sounds of the traffic, or the
passing airplane that rumbles overhead, each remind us of the present; of time
still moving forwards, oblivious to these old ghosts, which still exist; living
and re-living their personal dramas and dilemmas, from one century into the
next. It presents that theoretical idea
of the past as an ongoing narrative that takes place all around us, unseen,
again, like an echo to prior events. A
notion that the past is always amongst us; that any place we visit, any place
where we stand, is a part of history; a part of our own history, and a part of
someone else's.
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2 x 50 Years
of French Cinema [Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1995]:
Initial viewing, 5th of April, 2013.
I loved this
collaboration between Godard & Miéville and the actor Michel Piccoli, but
at the time I couldn't quite put into worlds WHY the film had felt so relevant
and so much fun. In all honesty, I still
can't. I wrote some vague fragments with
the intention of suggesting something of the playful, typically didactic
quality - of Godard and Miéville flirting between Histoire(s) du cinema-style
cine-essay and Soft and Hard-like domestic discourse - but I couldn't quite make
it stick. I think the real issue is that
the film provides its own commentary.
There is nothing that I can surmise or add to the film that an avid spectator
wouldn't automatically find in the conversations and discussions that occur
on-screen.
On an old scrap
of paper I'd written the following: A film of two halves. Questions and answers. Dialogues and investigation. The past and present as the two separate ends
of a traceable line. A lineage, of time
or influence, that runs throughout the development of this thing called
film. The titular mathematical equation,
2 x 50, equates a century, but a century in two parts. Pre-sound, pre-colour as the past; sound and
colour as the present. How then do we
celebrate this thing - this conception of cinema - which is never one thing to
all people, but a multifaceted contraption?
A limitless mirror that creates images by projecting a reflection of the
person looking back into its ever-changing face? This is the question that Godard seeks to
answer when he sits down to dinner with his friend and former associate Piccoli;
now the participating chairman of the official "Centenary Committee"
aiming to celebrate the first Hundred years of French film.
Godard
questions the motivations of the organisation in his typically cryptic
approach, as he goads the actor (playfully, but to the point of infuriation)
into considering the true condition of cinema, and how so often it is seen by the
younger generation to be a largely Hollywood-driven pursuit. Characteristic of many of Godard's late-period
films, the tone of 2 x 50 Years of French Cinema alternates between reflective
and melancholic (as Godard contemplates the notion of "old movies", while
music and art remain timeless) to incredibly funny; the introductory sequence,
in which Piccoli becomes the unwitting straight man to Godard's Groucho Marx, rivals
the TV interviews of Andy Kaufman at his most deadpan and derisive.
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Cosmopolis [David Cronenberg, 2012]:
Initial viewing, 8th of April, 2013.
After the subtly more accessible terrain of his no less remarkable
collaborations with Viggo Mortensen on A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern
Promises (2007), and the comparatively more restrained, almost classical
historical drama, A Dangerous Method (2011), Cosmopolis has the feel of
Cronenberg getting back to the root of films like Videodrome (1983), Naked
Lunch (1991), Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999).
It is again a film about disconnected characters seeking sensation
through less conventional means. The 'Cronenbergian'
ideal of "the new flesh" being discovered in this exaggerated critique
of the current generation and their preoccupation with "the self"; with
a blurring of personal realities, where the ephemeral transactions of the online
culture have created a new, more transient, more hermetic system of life.
With its central character becoming a "spectre haunting the
world" - a vapid, narcissistic millionaire drifting in his black limousine
sarcophagus through the chaos of financial collapse - the film struck me as a very
prescient portrait of the post-millennium culture. This generation that has been afforded great
wealth and privilege by doing very little, are now bored with everything! Life has become enclosed, detached; a series
of appointments, encounters. The
limousine that cuts a path through the crowded streets is like an extension of
who this character is; his sense of privilege and entitlement, his anonymity,
the void of personality, etc. The
gradual deterioration of the car as it is attacked by revellers and protestors,
becomes an on-screen representation of the character's own psychological
deterioration, as the world outside the car - outside his own influence -
becomes a protest against an uncertain future; one that threatens to upend the
influence of capitalism, destroying the dangerous thread that creates balance;
that keeps us in place.
Like many characters in Cronenberg's work, there is a sense of
someone embracing their own destruction.
The form of the film, static and stilted - creating a feeling of
inertia, of time standing still - communicates the boredom of a man that longs
for revolution - for death! - just to create some change to the stagnant social
order. In this gesture, he becomes a
character connected to the great lineage of Cronenberg protagonists - from
Adrian Tripod and Max Renn, to Bill Lee and Allegra Geller - and the world of
the film feels very much a part of the same future-sphere as earlier films, such
as Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977).
Perhaps the world of Eric Packer - the protagonist of the film - is yet another
stop on the road to the ruinous dystopia of Crimes of the Future (1970); that
hellish interzone where society teeters on the brink of a regression; into a
more primitive moral collapse.
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A Talking Picture [Manoel de Oliveira, 2003]
Initial viewing, 17th of April, 2013.
No other film had a greater impact during the previous year. From the leisurely travelogue of scenes that
make up the first half of its duration (where daughter and mother literally traverse
a thousand years of civilisation on a journey to reunite with their respective
father and spouse) to the subsequent scenes aboard the cruise ship (the
political discussions that lead, with unflinching precision, to one of the most
heart-breaking and unforgettable final sequences from any film ever made) A
Talking Picture was nothing less than captivating, provocative and wholly
immersive. Using an objective,
observational approach and the natural charisma of his cast, Oliveira creates a
film where both the voyage and its eventual resolution suggest an allegory for
the modern-world.
The central journey from Lisbon to Goa recalls that of the famed
Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, but the course - traversing the
Mediterranean and making stops in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and eventually
Turkey - brings to mind a similar progression from Jean-Luc Godard's subsequent
work, Film Socialisme (2010). Like that
particular film, the presence of the ocean liner becomes a microcosm of Europe
in the 21st century; where the dialogues between business woman Catherine
Deneuve, model and fashion designer Stefania Sandrelli, stage actress and
singer Irene Papas and the ship's captain John Malkovich, allows Oliveira to
discuss the idea of nationalism (or colonialism) in the age of the European
Union, as well as the struggle to retain a cultural identity in light of the ever
growing homogenisation of western culture, as it flourishes under the rule of
capitalism, in a very direct and unguarded approach.
The dialogues here are lengthy and invigorating, relevant to the
film's main journey into the past as a reflection to the present, but also inherently
naturalistic. They draw the audience into
the story of these two characters and the people they meet along the way, while
also managing to make a broader, more relevant point on the development of our
shared histories in the context of the no less violent struggles of our own
contemporary existence. The end of the
film takes this idea of the past as a mirror to the present in an entirely
different direction. The logical but no
less shocking conclusion that all this talk of "conflict" has been
leading to. An impression that
civilisations every bit as cultured and enlightened as our own were forged and
fell in the blink of an eye.
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The Three
Stooges [Bobby & Peter Farrelly, 2012]:
Initial viewing, 28th of April, 2013.
I find
comedy the most difficult genre to write about (or at least the most difficult
to do proper justice to), since comedy, by nature, is physical. Musicals and action movies are physical too,
but there the physicality seeks to express the psychological. If the mind is ecstatic with thoughts then a
dance is danced. If enraged, then the
body strikes out, in violence. But
comedy - and the kind of intensely physical comedy found in the film in
question - occurs simply for the benefit of the viewer. It is done for no other reason than to get a response
from the audience; to make us laugh and smile.
While the film has been dismissed by many as a thoroughly lowbrow
attempt by the Farrelly's to renegotiate the idea of The Three Stooges for the
modern world, I found the film to be both breathlessly entertaining and
hysterically funny. The kind of funny
where the ribs begins to ache from laughing so hard.
The fact
that The Three Stooges succeeds on the purest level would be enough to
necessitate inclusion, but I think the film is more interesting (if not intelligent)
than it's been credited with. Something
about the film's subtext seems compelling; a compliment to the brilliantly
choreographed and directed slapstick and the impeccable performances of the
three main leads. More than anything, I
think it's interesting how the "Stooges", as characters, relate to the
modern society; where the real idiots have since been elevated to the level of
Gods by the peculiarities of reality television; where the innocence of Larry,
Curly and Moe likewise seems elevated against the corruption of the culture,
the greed and the selfishness; and where the attempt by these characters to find
enough money to save the orphanage where they were raised shines
a light on the suffering of many marginalised individuals or cultural
organisations following the still recent economic crash.
To me, this
aspect of the film is incredibly faithful to the spirit of the original Stooges. Films like Three Little Pigskins (1934), Punch
Drunks (1934) and Disorder in the Court (1936), to name a few, were as much an
effort to lift the flagging morale of the American public as genuine narratives
to be seen and enjoyed. They were films
produced (mostly) during the time of The Great Depression, when audiences had
little to smile about. In the Farrelly's
film, the same intentions remain. The
sensibility of the film - bright and colourful and zany; like a live-action
cartoon - is designed to distract the audience from the tyranny of the everyday. The film is loaded with genuine suffering, child
abandonment, unemployment and an obvious satire of "reality" media
(still profiteering from society's great stooges, only now with full cooperation
from the culture), but all dressed in a way that allows the viewer to detach one's
self from the reality; to forget
ourselves and our woes.
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The Train [John Frankenheimer, 1964]
Initial viewing, 30th of April, 2013.
The Train is another of those films that I struggled to write
about at the time. I couldn't put into
words the feeling of the film or the experience of it, which was unforgettable. It's the kind of film where I was so intensely
invested in the narrative, the characters and the stylisation, that I became
lost in the adventure of it all. It's a
film that seems to straddle the indefinable line between "old Hollywood"
(as typified by the films of Hawks, Ford, Sturges, etc) and the "new
Hollywood" of films that would come to define the subsequent decade. The idea of Burt Lancaster playing an American-accented
Frenchman running around a succession of small villages in an effort to evade an
army of cartoon Nazi's could have been taken from any film from the mid-to-late
1940s, but the "studio-film" quaintness of the casting and the
motivations of the story are well balanced by Frankenheimer's muscular
direction and by the overwhelming subtext of the final scene.
While the casting ideas and the general storytelling
machinations were already becoming antiquated by the mid-1960s, the actual
cinematic approach (the staging, editing, cinematography and direction) has
lost none of its power to captivate and enthral. Shooting almost entirely on real locations,
the black & white cinematography gives the film and its setting a gritty
authenticity. It's no more
"realistic" than any other Hollywood film (where the lack of colour
already evokes a certain old-fashioned quality; something separate from the reality),
but nonetheless still expressive of something far more interesting about the
morality of these characters and the uncertain world in which they exist. To think of the context of the film and the
era in which it takes place, the lack of colour and the no-nonsense approach to
the composition, movement and editing of the film, seems to imply the brutality
of the era; the lack of colour, the rigidity of the frame, the punch of the cutting,
each creating the implication of a world without hope.
Although essentially a great action-adventure film (the scenes
of barrelling locomotives, with their heavy wheels grinding atop endless lines
of track, are
nothing short of breathtaking in their pre-CGI excitement), it is the ending of
the film that seems to push The Train towards something more philosophical and indelibly
profound. The subtext of the narrative -
a train full of stolen French art - can't help but recall the iconography of
the death camps; the Deutsche Reichsbahn that led innocent victims to their
deaths at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, etc.
In this sense, the attempt by Lancaster to "save" the train
(and as such, save its cargo) becomes an effort to redeem the human race. This interpretation seems manifest in the
final scenes, in which Frankenheimer daringly cross-cuts images of the great
paintings slung along the embankment with images of dead bodies lining the
tracks. Here the personification of the
art as illustrative of human atrocity (broadly, "the art of dying") is
permanently evoked.
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The Day of the Locust [John Schlesinger, 1975]:
Return viewing, 13th of May, 2013.
I'd been impressed by Schlesinger's film when I first saw it during
the winter of 2009, but mostly by the depiction of its vivid, apocalyptic
ending; the scenes of mass hysteria and mob brutality across a shimmering Hollywood
Boulevard, unforgettable in its intensity, illustrated a descent into genuine
terror that seemed to push the film's critique of the American dream as both hopeless
and dispiriting beyond anything I've ever experienced. At the time, my sense was that the climax was
so extraordinary and so charged with pure emotion that it overwhelmed the rest
of the film, which felt inert and laborious by comparison.
Returning to the film four years later, I now realise how
important the first half of the film is in giving weight to those final scenes. Much more than establishing a context for it,
or the sense of a calm before the story, it presents a loaded atmosphere in
which the emotions of characters slowly simmer and stew before reaching boiling
point in the most hysterical and disturbing way. It underlines the theme of the film (and the
theme of the novel by Nathanael West upon which the film is based); the idea of
Hollywood as a giant machine into which these innocent but desperate enough characters
are fed (willingly) through the meat grinder, all in the hope of achieving
great fame and even greater fortune.
It's that vision of Hollywood as an inferno, the studio contract
as Faustian pact, and how these characters, having become soulless as a result
of the moral malaise of the era, find themselves robbed of all personality. So much of the film takes place on the
outskirts of the town. The suburbs, up
in the hills, or on the fringes. It's a
world blistering and sun scared. A world
populated by those who've tasted the sweet highs of the Hollywood dream but
have since fallen on hard times. Through
the interwoven narrative of its central characters, Schlesinger's film picks
apart the open wound of the movie industry and turns it into a psychodrama; a
grotesque pageant on man's inhumanity to man.
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Throne of Blood [Akira Kurosawa, 1957]:
Return viewing, 20th of May, 2013.
In the absence of anything more tangible to state, I'd like to
share a little back-story. I first saw this
film as a sullen teenager, circa the mid-00s, and sad to say, I didn't
really "get it." I didn't have
the depth of experience or the patience or the understanding of the original
text to comprehend what Kurosawa and his collaborators were doing with this
highly unorthodox and atmospheric play on Shakespeare's immortal Macbeth. At the time, I was still discovering movies
as more than just a passive pursuit, and this obsession was leading me towards films
produced outside of my own culture; my own era of existence. In short, I was unprepared for what I saw.
Without context to anchor me, the of-the-time
"old-fashionedness" of the film, with its obvious interior sets,
theatrical performance style and jarring use of the transitional wipe, seemed
primitive to a snarky teenager already arrogant enough to assume expertise
because he'd seen a few Stanley Kubrick movies. I still see this attitude a lot on sites like
IMDb and I like to think that all aspiring young movie buffs go through this
period of moronic artistic rejection as a kind of rite of passage. A process that involves dismissing the
celebrated cultural artefacts that came before in an effort to build-up our own
conception of cinema (based on our own individual tastes), but still safe in
the knowledge that the more movies we see and experience, the greater the
ability to perceive the importance of those rejected masterworks when we
eventually return to them, older and wiser.
I re-discovered Kurosawa again a few years ago and have been
very slowly (but surely) working my way through his filmography since. In 2013 I saw three movies by the
director. I Live in Fear (1955) and
The Hidden Fortress (1958)
were both first time viewings, but it was the return viewing of the film in
question that impressed me the most. I
still can't put into words exactly why the film was so exhilarating, but a lot
of it had to do with the visual sensation of it. The rolling fog, the intensity of the
imagery, the sound, the performances.
The design, direction and overall atmosphere of the film is conceptually
fascinating and intense - more like a horror film than a more conventional
samurai epic - and my reaction, in this sense, was entirely emotional.
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Larisa [Elem Klimov, 1980]:
Initial viewing, 22nd of May, 2013.
I once saw a collection of still frames from this film on
another blog-site and was immediately intrigued. I knew of Klimov only from his landmark anti-war
effort, Come and See (1985), which is one of my favourite films, so I was already
quite eager to see more of the director's work.
The film, in its combination of documentary, photo-montage, personal
reflection and confessional, effectively functions as a tribute to a woman who
no longer exists, except in images, moving and still. The voice of the woman - conjured,
phantom-like, from haunted recordings that suggest the continuation of a life beyond
death - speaks, in clear terms, about the difficulties faced by the individual,
and of her own influences and ideological struggles as both an artist and a
woman to remain true to her own creative ambitions and intent.
The film, a kind of memorial piece assembled by the subject's
husband as a response to his own state of tearful mourning, becomes a celebration
of the talent of this woman; the filmmaker Larisa Shepitko. A celebration as well as a lament, which
attempts, through the combination of sound and image, to honour the spirit of
this woman, but also to present, through images edited from her own films, the
sadness felt by those left bruised and broken in the wake of her death. In the gallery of lost and hopeless faces, or
in the scenes of pure anguish found in Shepitko's own films - amongst them
Krylya (1966) and The Ascent (1976) - Klimov is able to express, movingly, but
without sentimentality, an outpouring of his own grief and admiration and the
tragedy of his (and our) loss.
Beginning with a wordless montage of photographs of Shepitko showing
her progression from wide-eyed infant to a glamorous and successful woman on
the cusp of middle-age, the film progresses through the success and
achievements of her own professional career, beyond the last attempts to film
an adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's novel Farewell to Matyora, and eventually
reaching a kind of conclusion at the site of the accident that claimed her
life. The film ends with the very last
piece of footage ever directed by Shepitko.
An image, described by Klimov himself as "an eternal tree, the
symbol of perseverance and dignity, the symbol of faith in the endless
continuation of what we call life."
A final elegy, suggestive of the lasting influence of this woman, as
stoical and enduring as the tree itself.
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The Hitcher [Robert Harmon, 1986]:
Return viewing, 1st of June, 2013.
I'd undoubtedly seen this film before. I remembered the plot - the set-up of the
young kid picking up a hitchhiker who turns out to be a merciless killer - and
I remembered the opening sequence; the rain, the headlights cutting a path through
the darkness, the claustrophobia of the car itself. I remembered the scene with Jennifer Jason
Leigh and how my dad had already given away what was about to happen in the
usual way that he likes to consciously spoil movies as an effort to show off
his knowledge of something that others are yet to have seen. I remember enjoying the film as a work of
entertainment, but also finding it somewhat generic and disposable. A kind of standard slasher movie "riff"
that was only given a greater degree of credibility through the menacing and disarmingly
charismatic performance of Rutger Hauer as the title character.
Returning to the film for the first time in what must have been
a decade (if not more), I was surprised at how much I remembered from that
first encounter, but even more surprised at how far the film had surpassed my earlier
impressions of it. At the time, it
hadn't even registered how strange the film was. Not just the storyline - which doesn't even
strive for naturalism or plausibility, instead taking a provocative "what
if..." concept and spinning it off into a genuine descent into hell - but
the atmosphere of the film; the imagery and the way the unanswered questions
leave room for the audience to project their own interpretations against it. There are images that seem ripped from the
most vivid of dreams or from the darkest of darkening nightmares.
Eerie scenes of deserted police stations, lost highways, suicide
attempts (filmed like symbolic rituals glimpsed through a blistering lens flare),
or the continual allusions to death (as representation, apropos The Seventh
Seal, by Bergman), the ferryman (think Charon of Hades) and a kind of blatantly
homoerotic variant on psychosexual threat. I'd argue that there's something of The
Terminator (1984) in this story of the vulnerable couple pursued by a seemingly
unstoppable killing machine, with the entire narrative becoming a prolonged
nightmare in which protagonists are in a sense made passive, forced to watch
helplessly as events spiral so astonishingly out of control. For me, Harmon's film is every bit as great
as Cameron's tech-noir masterpiece. It
stands alongside the director's first film, the brilliant short feature, China
Lake (1983), as one of the great unsung masterworks of '80s cinema.
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