The
Fifth Cord [Luigi Bazzoni, 1971]:
Watched: Feb 12, 2019
The Fifth Cord is best
described as a 'giallo' in blue. Its colour scheme frequently coming back to
the shade in question, which saturates the image, giving it a melancholy
feeling. A kind of day-for-night emptiness that seems quintessentially matched
to its procedural elements of urban alienation and police investigation;
creating an impression of sadness and isolation that stands in contrast to the
sun-kissed exoticism of other films from the same sub-genre, such as Four Flies
on Grey Velvet (1971), Don't Torture a Duckling (1972), The House with Laughing
Windows (1976) or the later Tenebrae (1982). As a work of pure formalism, The
Fifth Cord is a film concerned as much with the visual representation of lines
and shapes, or blocks of colour and light streaming through vertical and
horizontal blinds, as it is in the machinations of the murder mystery. Every
location is interesting and commands the frame. Photographed by the legendary
Vittorio Storaro, who brings to the film something
of the same stylisation that he brought previously to Bernardo Bertolucci's
great masterpiece The Conformist (1970), The Fifth Cord remains one of the most
distinct and visually intelligent films in the sub-genre's history. Luigi Bazzoni
is one of the real enigmas of Italian genre cinema. At his peak he directed
only five feature-length films, three mysteries and two westerns, and then,
following a break of almost twenty years, returned to make a series of
documentaries. I saw his later film, Footprints on the Moon (1975), around the
same time I started this blog and it was one of the films I most wanted to
write about. Like the film in question it's a bizarre mystery, elevated by
incredibly ornate art nouveau interiors and Storaro's photography, which, as a
subversion of its genre, feels closer to Last Year at Marienbad (1961) than A
Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971).
Woman
on the Run [Norman Foster, 1950]:
Watched: Feb 17, 2019
The actuality of late-1940s
San Francisco turns this already compelling noir into a time capsule of real
locations, brimming with energy and atmosphere. As a protégé of Orson Welles,
director Norman Foster builds on the standard thriller template and elevates it
through "Wellsian" affectations and idiosyncrasies, including
formalist stylisations, canted angles and the kind of shot compositions that
recall The Lady from Shanghai (1947). However, the filmmaker isn't just paying
homage here; the characters are compelling, while the storytelling is relaxed
but suspenseful. In the lead role, Ann Sheridan is one of the great
protagonists in the history of the noir subgenre. She's resilient, driven and
remains sympathetic without having to play aggressively on the standard
weak-willed characteristics of "the damsel" as often presented by the
non-femme fatale characters in these kinds of films. Even when the narrative
requires her to be placed in moments of peril, she still maintains an air of strength
and commitment. The final act, set both above and below the boardwalk and
between the rides and attractions of an end of pier funfair, demonstrates levels
of suspense and storytelling engagement that place the film quite comfortably
alongside the analogous thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock, such as Notorious (1946)
and Strangers on a Train (1951).
The
Last Movie [Dennis Hopper, 1971]:
Watched: Feb 19, 2019
Comparisons to Orson
Welles's long gestating and only recently completed "final" feature, The
Other Side of the Wind (2018), seem fair; Hopper's once obscure but newly
resurfaced follow-up to Easy Rider (1968) is a similar relic to the
counterculture, and to that brief period in American cinema, liberated by the
influences of Europe and Japan, where anything seemed possible. As a complete work,
The Last Movie is at points enthralling, disaffecting and completely
disorienting, with moments of visual transcendence. The image of a native film
crew re-enacting a shoot with wooden cameras is especially brilliant, as Hopper
and his collaborators find a perfect figurative shorthand to the immaterial
nature of cinema, its inaccessibility as a genuine folk art, and how the
practicalities of making a film, when reduced to this kind of childlike game of
performative playacting, are reclaimed and demystified. While the film can
prove difficult and even distancing, it feels like an important work that's
worth enduring in order to grapple with some of the themes and ideas that
Hopper and his co-writer Stuart Stern are presenting. Step back from the film's
chaotic mosaic of conflicting plotlines, alienation techniques and drug-induced
lunacy, and The Last Movie reveals a sensitive and elegiac commentary on the
end of American idealism, "the west" and the western, and the
disintegration of the Hollywood machine. It's a frustrating and often languorous
experience, but it nonetheless remains a singular and impassioned piece of work
that is unlike anything produced today.
Climax
[Gaspar Noé, 2018]:
Watched: Feb 23, 2019
The first hour of Climax
hints at a genuine masterpiece: something powerful, visceral, original and
shocking; "pure cinema" with an emphasis on form, movement and
rhythm. To experience some of the film's strongest sequences is to experience
one of the most confident and compelling uses of sound and image to convey an
atmosphere of chemically enhanced boredom giving way to jubilation, abandon,
and subsequently chaos. It falls apart somewhat in the final third, refusing to
progress to a deeper level, never quite developing into a narrative that exists
beyond the drug trip disorientation theme. That said, I still liked Climax more
than any other work I've seen by Gaspar Noé; a
filmmaker I usually despise. The film probably had more potential to do
something extraordinary, something that reached beyond the experiments with
form, or the attempts to shock or provoke, to find a genuine purpose or
philosophy that becomes emotionally as well as psychologically transcendent,
but it's still a film that contains moments of brilliance, and one that I'm keen
to return to. Even if his sincerity and integrity as an artist can be called
into question, Noé has always been a skilled technician, and Climax finds the
filmmaker working at the peak of his abilities.
Beauty and the Beast
[Jean Cocteau, 1946]:
Watched: Feb 24, 2019
It was the film critic Mark
Cousins, and the 'tweet' in which he argued that the then-recently released Glass
(2019) was to M. Night Shyamalan what The Testament of Orpheus (1960) was to Jean
Cocteau, that reignited the spark of interest I had in
the work of the artist in question. Having subsequently re-watched both Orphée
(1950) and its abovementioned companion piece, I turned my attention to a film
that I've read about and seen clips from since the very beginning of my
developing interest in film but had otherwise never fully seen. Long since
considered to be a classic of French cinema and a key work of fantasy cinema in
general, Cocteau's adaptation of the 1757 story by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is a marvel of atmosphere and
imagination. Before the advent of computer-generated imagery, the early cinema,
from Georges Méliès to Robert Wiene, was akin to a magic act, where special
effects were created 'in-camera' using a variety of theatrical
techniques. Cocteau maintains the traditions of those early pioneers by
creating fantastical, otherworldly images through simple techniques, such a
slow-motion, mirrored images, double-exposures, miniatures and
forced-perspectives, and even reverse-motion, all creating the impression of a
twilight world that seems to exist outside of our own. The thematic
interpretations that have carried from Leprince de Beaumont's text through to
other adaptations made since are still apparent, but it's arguable that Cocteau,
who was a homosexual, was using the relationship in his film to comment on the
marginalisation and debasement of homosexuals in post-war society, as men were
ostracized and turned into "beasts" by the prejudices of others,
simply because of their romantic desires. Either way, the film is defined by Cocteau's
usual interest in acts of faith, poetic gestures, and the existence of doorways,
windows and magic mirrors leading between worlds.
