Taxi

"Midday. I've gone for croissants and married the baker in despair."

Notes on 'the Auteur'

When people discredit the "auteur" theory, it always seems to be based on an assumption that it implies a director is the only person responsible for the making of a film. This is obviously not true. As we're often told, film is a collaborative medium. And yet, even the most democratic of creative endeavors still has someone leading the project, acting as the funnel through which ideas are channeled, shaping the work from the ground up. Admittedly, having read very little critical theory, my conception of the auteur theory never seemed inherently specific to the role of the director. Yes, many directors are, or at the very least will be seen as "auteur" filmmakers, especially those that also write or conceive their own work. However, this isn't to say that the director is always the auteur.

For me, when we claim a film is the work of an "auteur", we're really saying, in the most plain and mundane terms, that it has an author. That despite the countless number of individual crew members, performers, producers, and financiers that may have contributed to the making of a film, that there was someone at the center of things, shepherding the project through to completion. This "auteur" could be the director, the writer, the producer and even the lead actor.

Think of the films of action stars like Tom Cruise, Jackie Chan, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme, among others. They may work with directors that have a reputation for being "auteur" filmmakers, but there is nonetheless a consistency to the kind of subject matter these performers return to, an autonomy to how they're filmed and presented, a level of control over how the material is shaped and distributed, all of which go beyond the familiarities of their directors' prior or subsequent works. These actors are the authors of their respective films, their image and, to a large extent, their own legacies.

By contrast, in the modern Hollywood, the author of the work is often the studio and its army of executives. In the films of Disney®, including works by Pixar and Marvel Studios, the role of the writer, producer and director is to facilitate the creative wishes of the studio executives. They're not creating their own personal vision; they're creating a product that the studio has the power to approve or decline. In television, the series creator, or showrunner, is generally the "auteur." For instance, everyone recognizes a Ryan Murphey production when they see one – from Nip/Tuck (2003-2010) and American Horror Story (2011-present) to the more recent Netflix distributed Hollywood (2020), they have a consistent style, politics and casting – regardless of who writes or directs the individual episodes.

A good example of what I'm getting at here can be found in the film in question. Taxi (1998), a knockabout French action movie with aspirations to Hollywood, is directed (and directed well) by the veteran film and commercials director Gérard Pirès. Pirès's work on the film cannot be discredited. While Taxi isn't a great film, it is nonetheless well-acted, the story, thin as it is, remains frequently engaging, and the action sequences, particularly the way the numerous car chases have been filmed and edited, are never less than thrilling. But Pirès's isn't the author of the film, but rather fulfilling the vision of his writer and producer, Luc Besson.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

From the ground-up, Taxi is characteristic of Besson's own work as director, specifically his earlier films, such as Subway (1985) and La Femme Nikita (1990), and it sets the tone and template for many of the subsequent action movies the author would go on to write and produce, including The Transporter (2002), District 13 (2004) and Taken (2008), as well as those films' later sequels. In each of these works, Besson takes typically French characters, humor and settings, and juxtaposes them with very American themes, genres and storytelling devices, and the same is true for the film in question. Taxi is one-part "cinéma du look", one-part Hollywood buddy movie (à la 48 Hours [1982]), and one-part precursor to the "Fast & Furious" franchise.

Like Subway, the film begins with a burst of action. A vehicle speeding through the daytime streets, piloted by our central character. The camera, almost at ground-level, trails behind the vehicle, with loud music used to set the tone for action and excitement.

Subway [Luc Besson, 1985]:

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

In both films, the opening chase sequence is used to establish character and setting. Subway shows off the familiar Parisian settings recognisable from countless films before and since, while Taxi showcases the less familiar, though more exotic highways and byways of suburban Marseilles. However, these opening sequences, or title sequences even, also provide a more important function in expanding but also subverting the expectations of the viewing audience and our perception of the contemporary French cinema.

For a populist like Besson, the intention with films like Subway and Taxi, as well as later films like the aforementioned District 13, is to recreate the idea of the "French film™." To break apart the loftier or more highbrow expectations that audiences outside of France had come to associate with their national cinema, typified as it was internationally by the classic early exports of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir and Henri-Georges Clouzot, or the subsequent films of the "New Wave" and works by serious "auteur" filmmakers, like Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.

International audiences tend to think of French cinema in these terms: small apartments, relationship dramas, black and white cinematography, poetic ruminations, loneliness, existentialism, and joyless sex. In reality, the French cinema has almost always produced mainstream comedies, low-brow farce, action films, cop movies and gory horror; films that generally made huge amounts of money at the domestic box-office but rarely travelled outside of French-speaking territories. Given an international platform through the success of his earlier work, Besson continued onwards in his attempts to create films that were accessible to the broadest of audiences, forging an image of a new French cinema that was young, dumb and full of fun; where fast cars and fast women (usually with guns) engaged in scenes of full-bodied action; and where there were enough moments of eccentricity and childlike whimsy intercut to give the impression that the films were perhaps more individualist than they really were.

In its best moments, Taxi recalls the legacy of the "cinéma du look": the brief and contentious film movement coined by critic Raphaël Bassan in La Revue du Cinéma issue n° 448, May 1989, which lumped together the works of directors Jean-Jacques Beineix, Leos Carax and Besson himself. The characteristics of the "cinéma du look" was an emphasis on youth and subcultures, on alienated characters in a state of rebellion against the modern world, and on the conflict between the lasting legacy of the films of the French new wave and the burgeoning influence of the new Hollywood movies produced during the 1970s and early 1980s. Films like Diva (1981), Subway and Mauvais sang (1986), while markedly different from one another in their attitudes and intentions, were seen to take recognizable Hollywood genres like mystery, film noir and science fiction, and dismantle them, populating them with bored but beautiful characters, self-reflexive allusions to popular culture and a glossy contemporary style.

We see that here in Taxi, specifically in its earlier sequences, which finds in its central character, pizza delivery driver turned taxi driver Daniel Morales, the kind of laid-back, directionless but streetwise dreamer that we might have found in films like Boy Meets Girl (1984) or Betty Blue (37°2 le matin, 1986). That he lives out of a converted garage full of car parts and vehicles in states of repair and works out of a weird brutalist pizza restaurant on the edges of the docks, also helps evoke the further influence of Beineix and Carax, specifically The Moon in the Gutter (1983) and the aforementioned Diva and Mauvais sang.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Mauvais sang (Bad Blood) [Leos Carax, 1986]:

The Moon in the Gutter [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1983]:

However, the moment the titular taxi inexplicably transforms from anonymous cab to tricked-out hotrod, effectively signals the moment both the film, and Besson's career, shift from quirky "cinéma du look" to brainless DTV action. While the film remains well-made and entertaining, it seems to signal a definite change in direction for Besson, who would never really recapture the same adoration and respect that he'd commanded as a filmmaker during the 1980s and early-to-mid 1990s, with later works, both as director and producer, failing with both audiences and critics.

While Taxi attempts and largely succeeds in creating a French film with a Hollywood outlook and a greater emphasis on entertainment and spectacle, it's never quite found the same creative success or cultural legacy as Besson's own action cinema that preceded it, specifically La Femme Nikita and the problematic Léon (aka, The Professional, 1994). Taxi is full of moments of great action, stunts and thrilling chase sequences, but it's also marred by Besson's deficiencies as a screenwriter. Chiefly, the film is shamelessly sexist, with female characters providing no real function to the plot beyond reinforcing the heterosexual masculinity of the central characters, or worse, being mercilessly leered over and harassed by both the protagonists and the camera itself. There's also the usual crass stereotyping and actual racism that frequently turn up in Besson's scripts, as if jokes about all people from South East Asia looking alike will somehow engender sympathy between the central characters.

Taxi [Gérard Pirès, 1998]:

Despite these various shortcomings, the film wasn't without interest. Again, it's perfectly entertaining, often amusing, with great car stunts and thrilling action sequences, and a great affinity for character, and the natural atmosphere of its south of France locations. It also features moments that point towards an even better film that might have been: specifically the earlier sequences, which are more preoccupied with the relationship between characters; the subculture of young people that converge on this strange and deeply cinematic pizza restaurant; and the feeling of vibrant, nocturnal worlds existing on the fringes of society. Ultimately however, the film is of most interest in marking and defining the evolution of Besson's career as it developed from respected cult filmmaker to entertainment entrepreneur, and how it illustrates the role of the "auteur", not as the director, but the person shaping the material from the ground-up.

Further reading at Lights in the Dusk: Luc Besson: An Introduction? [26^th September 2019], Possible Worlds: A look at the science-fiction films of Luc Besson [20^th October 2019], The Film Director as Superstar: Or, The death of the author auteur [15^th August, 2020]

C'est Le Vent, Betty

Thoughts on a film: Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) (1986)

FOREWORD:

I'd been struggling to find the words for this film, which seems impossible to define or to explicate in any rational or meaningful way beyond the meagre confession that I saw myself in its moving reflection; a past-life remembrance glimpsed in the fragments of a wayward courtship between a young bum who dreams of being a writer, but who hides from life and its various difficulties and concerns, and the beautiful brunette with the bee stung lips and the wide eyes that seem to burn with the passion and intensity of a protective lioness.

In this couple who find paradise in the arms one another - in the skin against skin embrace that becomes a suit of armour that protects them from the slings and arrows of a difficult world - I saw the ghost of something stirring.  A long lost relationship that was as haunting, magnificent and unpredictable as the film itself.  It's possible that without these bare emotions to draw upon, the film might have remained inaccessible, too eccentric, or forever beyond my reach.

LA BELLE NOISEUSE:

Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986]:

So often with film criticism - or even film appreciation at any basic, mainstream level - we're taught to approach a work using the parameters dictated by genre and tone.  A comedy is a great comedy if it makes us laugh and smile.  A tragedy becomes a powerful tragedy if it "moves" us; if it forces us to think about the plight of characters, the suffering of people; if it compels the audience to break down and cry.  A romance should be romantic (naturally) and whimsical (maybe), but also contain enough passion and pathos to remind us of our own greatest loves, either lost or won.

We cling to these hand-me-down expectations or classifications of intent because it makes it easier for us to put the work into the correct box; to say, "This is a drama, so it should work like this."  But how then do we approach a film that makes us laugh and smile, but also rips the heart out; that is evocative of fond and warming memories, but still brings us to the brink of tears?  How do we move between scenes that are light and breezy, eccentric and full of love, to scenes of bitter remorse, anger, brutality and violent self-harm?  How do we identify with a relationship where the characters are impulsive, selfish, impetuous, but are led by emotions both honest and true?

To do so, the viewer must throw out those limitations that we've been taught to embrace.  We have to accept the madness of the work - its contempt for tradition, the emotional highs and lows - just as the central character of the film, the luckless Zorg, must accept the irrationalities of Betty; the free-spirited, impulsive, volatile but deeply beautiful nuisance whose presence and spirit dominates the entire film.  Zorg loves Betty and finds in her a reason to live.  He accepts her often belligerent conduct - tolerates it, makes excuses for her - because deep down he recognises that her presence and love is enough to light the darkness of a bleak and soulless existence.

From the earliest scenes the behaviour of Betty is erratic, impulsive, tinged with violence.  It's obvious that this is a relationship doomed to failure (if not worse), but the power of Betty, and her limitless passion, is overwhelming.  She transforms Zorg as she transforms the viewing audience, captivating us both.  Her presence, smile, the sound of her voice, the touch of her body, is enough to bring colour into the world.  She encourages the protagonist, and while her actions get him into trouble, or propel him on this journey into heartache and devastation, she undoubtedly enriches his course of life.

IN LIVING, COLOUR:

Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986]:

When the film begins, Zorg is in retreat.  He's given up on life; no longer living, just making do.  Betty energies him, first through her passion - their lovemaking, the intensity of the physical act - but soon through her compassion, her belief in his talents, her commitment to his beliefs.  By burning down the beachfront shack where Zorg lives and works as an off-season caretaker, she's forcing the character out of his sense of complacency; pushing him out into the wider world, to engage with it and to realise his full potential as both an artist and a human being.  This causes problems for the protagonist, but in the long term it pushes him towards greatness.  From this point on the character will live for Betty and this commitment will give him direction, a purpose; after all, to live for someone is the same as having something to live for.  The tragedy of the film comes from the reversal of positive and negative energies.  While Zorg flourishes - his life without hope and direction transformed by the love of this woman - Betty begins to wilt.  Denied the things she most desires (a baby; to see Zorg become published) their relationship falls into despair.

While the first half of the film is effortless, fun, vibrant and sexy, the third act is tinged with frustration, sadness and a heart-wrenching grief.  And yet throughout, the emotions of the work are completely true.  The film is suffused with a very real and very palpable feeling of life, with all of its ups and downs, joys and regrets.  This is the power of Beineix's work.  While its flights of fancy, its indulgences and eccentricities, its scenes of heightened emotional intensity, might suggest something beyond the realms of reality (more like a fairy tale, or romantic fantasy) there is an inherent truth to this relationship; to their moments of intimacy, their arguments, their fears and concerns.  This truth gives credibility to even the most wild or exaggerated moments; it brings us back to those core emotions, which are authentic, believable and entirely recognisable.

A COMET FROM THE SKIES:

Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986]:

In discussing the film and its intentions, Beineix himself states the following: "[The] movie came like a fairy tale, like a comet from the skies.  I was sent this novel by Philippe Djian, still in gallies.  It hadn't yet been published.  I read the book and loved it.  From the very beginning, I was in love with the characters and the story.  A lot of people asked me, "How can you make a picture out of that?" And I said, "How can I not?"  I thought it was funny.  There were great lines, which were literature, because Philippe Djian is an author.  But this literature I knew I could put into dialogue, and from time to time I allowed myself to add some dialogue and some other original ideas.  It was the easiest movie I've ever made."

"What appealed to the audience worldwide was the fact that a love story has to be big and this was a big love story.  At the same time, it was very casual.  These were two people who aren't rich or ride fancy cars or live in fancy apartments.  Their lives and the experience of their love brought them to a state of happiness and excitement that everyone would like to experience.  I think it was also the fact that the film was situated nowhere.  It was France but it could have been many places - it didn't look so French."

"I think another reason as to why it was so successful was because of the extraordinary performances of Jean-Hugues Anglade and Beatrice Dalle.  Betty is an image of youth.  She is what young people are.  They need movement.  They needed changes.  They need the world to change.  She is expecting something big.  When she sees the world doesn't match her expectations, I think she turns against herself.  She is an allegory of what young people are.  You have to give them something - not only to sell them clothes and junk food - but ideas that help them to move the world."

HYSTERICAL AND USELESS:

Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986]:

While Beineix envisioned the character of Betty as a symbol of youth, she remains, more than anything, a representation of the emotions that define the vast majority of romantic courtships.  In the first half of the film she reflects an unbound passion and sexuality.  She's liberated, uninhibited, like couples in the first stages of love.  As the two characters settle into their new life in the city, she becomes agitated, concerned about the future.  After the move to the countryside she finds a greater contentment, and settles into a role of domestic servitude and the yearning for family life.  However, when faced with the perils and pitfalls that seek to shake us from the romantic ideal, she becomes bitter and withdrawn.  When she transformers herself into a painted grotesque, she's creating an external projection of the black and hopeless thoughts that eat away at that spark of life that so enraptured both Zorg and the viewing audience.  The self-destruction of this beauty remains one of the saddest and most upsetting images in all of cinema.

By the end of the film Zorg too is swallowed up by sadness and disappointment.  His dalliance with Betty has set him on a course for greatness; rescued him from the shitty job, the crumbling old shack.  She gave him love, purpose and fulfillment, but as the tide breaks against the sandy blue dusk, we sense the yearnings of a character who would give it all to reclaim those chaste and innocent moments of physical expression that made the first half of the film such an unparalleled joy.  As ever in times of deep reflection, old photographs imprison memories; warmly but also cruelly reminding us of those happier times.

A REFLECTION:

Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986]:

As a character, Zorg could just as easily be me.  His attitude, his retreat, is all too familiar.  His failure and the shame of failure are similar to my own.  With his big nose and shaggy brown locks, we could even pass for brothers; while in the image of Betty - the joyful Betty; beautiful and resplendent; luminescent in high heels and lips stained cherry red - I found only "her."  This personal connection brought the movie to life in a way that was sometimes painful, but in a strange way as bittersweet as the film's final shot.

Betty may have gone, but the memories still linger.  The mind, as powerful as it is in its ability to conjure up the sound of a voice, the presence of a person no longer there in the physical sense, plays tricks on us.  But these tricks - like our relationships with these lovers that seem to carve out from us a part of our own identity when they leave - give us hope.

EPILOGUE:

Betty Blue (37.2°C in the Morning) [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986]:

As the wistful soundtrack of Gabriel Yared plays us out, Zorg sits on the precipice of an uncertain future.  In his notebook he writes the story of his relationship with Betty; the story we've just seen depicted on screen.  Out of nowhere a white cat appears with eyes that once again burn with a furious attentiveness.  Suddenly, as if compelled by a supernatural force, we hear the voice of Betty, still tender and sweet.  "Are you writing?" she asks.  "No" Zorg replies.  "I was just thinking."  It's a scene that in the wrong hands could have easily seemed phony, comical or elicited uncomfortable jeers.  However, as a moment of punctuation to this film of extraordinary vision, insight, emotion and depth, it is at once heartbreaking and life affirming in its unguarded sincerity.

This is a film that perhaps moved and excited me more than any other film I've seen this year, and as such, I feel compelled to throw superlatives at it; to argue its stature as Beineix's greatest achievement, as one of the landmarks of 80s cinema, as one of the most beautiful films ever made.  I could go even further and talk about some of the colour choices and how they seem to relate to the reversal of gender identities, or express emotions through bold uses of saturated hues (for instance, deep reds, greens, yellow and blue).  I could talk about the use of landscapes (and changing landscapes) to map the progression of the relationship, or to express the idea of freedom, or liberation from the self, but for now I'm content enough to let the memory of the film - its story and its characters, and the emotions that they evoke - rest awhile in the heart and mind, until I can experience the film again.

A Year in Film (Part One)

A Viewing List for Twenty-Thirteen

A continuation of the same theme as last year's list, "A Year in Film", subtitled "Twelve in Twenty-Twelve."  This year I'm hoping to take the list in a slightly different direction, breaking it down into four parts and covering all the significant titles that I watched, or re-watched, during the course of the preceding months.  Last year, I narrowed my final list down to only twelve titles, consisting of the ten greatest films I saw for the first time, one film that came close to actual greatness and one film that most benefited from a 2012 reappraisal.  Originally, I'd intended to do a follow up list, including an additional twenty titles (Twenty in Twenty-Twelve, etc), but by the time 2013 had edged into the summer months and the project was still nowhere near to completion, it became increasingly clear that the intended "sequel" was never going to occur.  To safeguard against this same failure for the current year, I've been directing all my efforts to completing the list in its entirety.  All other posts have been added to the backlog to create additional time to focus my attentions here.

As a result of the "Key Films" project, I've already written at length about several of the titles contained in this compendium.  As such, some of the reasons and justifications posted below will regrettably be re-written modifications of these original posts.  However, as the list progresses through the later installments, I'll be making a concentrated effort to include several additional titles that are otherwise new to the blog.  The "Key Films" series unfortunately lost momentum towards the end of the year.  This was largely the result of a technical issue (owing mostly to a broken internet connection) and the heavy burden of work.  There was also a desire to get back to the kind of film criticism that I find to be the most satisfying and rewarding.  The posts where I take specific images from films and create an analysis; pushing my own unashamedly subjective and often foolish interpretation as far as it can go.  This particular effort to study the frames and the film itself currently holds a much greater appeal, at least more-so than writing conventional reviews or just translating an opinion into text.

As with last year's list, this current installment of "A Year in Film" is not intended to be a catalogue of films released in 2013 (I still need to see at least seventy more titles before embarking on such a thing), but a list of films seen in 2013.  A kind of scrapbook of experiences, not necessarily intended to function as "proper reviews" or anything more definitive, but just an attempt to capture something of the experience and why these films, more than any others, have remained a constant, throughout.  This particular part of the list includes film seen between the very end of December 2012 and the beginning of March 2013 and will hopefully be followed by 'Part Two' sometime before the close of the subsequent week.

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Come and Go [João César Monteiro, 2003]:

Initial viewing, 30th of December, 2012.  Return viewing, 28th of December, 2013.

This one's a bit of a cheat, since the film wasn't initially a 2013 discovery.  However, its position as a first time viewing unfortunately fell between the completion of last year's list, Twelve in Twenty-Twelve (in which I acknowledged the presence of Monteiro's 1999 film, The Spousals of God, as a personal favourite), and the beginning of the 'viewing log' project (in which I discussed, in brief, the same director's 1989 feature, Recollections of the Yellow House).  This, as an omission, was especially infuriating, since Come and Go was perhaps the finest film I saw during the entire course of 2012.  Just to make it legitimate, I re-watched the film this past December (almost exactly a year later) and found the second experience to be even more affecting, amusing and immersive than the first.

As the title suggests, Come and Go is a film of encounters, stops and journeys.  The central character, the intellectual but irrepressible João Vuvu (a protagonist not entirely dissimilar to Monteiro's notorious alter ego, João de Deus), rides the bus across Lisbon on his way to meet a succession of old friends and acquaintances.  The daily rituals here establish a particular structure; one in which the journey by bus seems intended to link the lonely but decadent home life of the central character (as defined by his often hilarious efforts to find and eventually seduce a replacement for his malingerer maid) to the social engagements that punctuate his passage through the rest of the film.  Here, the character and his various companions indulge in lengthy conversations about life and their experiences, as if already anticipating the finality of their own individual days.

Characteristic of late Monteiro, Come and Go is a work both contemplative and episodic in presentation.  An observational film, where the use of those long-held, static compositions, seem designed to transform the interactions, conversations, arguments and events into moments of living theatre.  However, it is in the film's final scene (staged beneath a giant cedar tree in the Principe Real Garden), that Monteiro performs his greatest miracle.  Here, the tree itself - age'd and alone, but with deep roots that connect it to this place; this park that first appeared in the director's second film, He Who Awaits Dead Men's Shoes Dies Barefoot (1970) - becomes symbolic of the character's own place within the infinite.  A fitting backdrop to this final dance of light, as reflected in a ghostly eye.

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On the Beat [Robert Asher, 1962]:

Initial viewing, 25th of January, 2013.

I'm not entirely sure how well-known Norman Wisdom is outside the UK, but his early films - in particular those in which he played a variation on his sympathetic and proudly proletariat 'Pitkin' persona - made the comedian a national treasure.  I watched several of his early films during the summer of 2012 and enjoyed them to the greatest extent; so much so that I eventually bought a budget-priced Norman Wisdom box-set containing twelve films that would effectively see me through into the following year.  While most of the films contained in this set were very good - especially Trouble in Store (1953), One Good Turn (1954), Man of the Moment (1955) and the satirical The Square Peg (1958) - it is the film in question that seems to me to endure as the definitive Wisdom benchmark.

The best of Wisdom's work most often played to the social limitations of the performer.  Characteristically, his Pitkin protagonist - the weedy, well-meaning and defiantly working class naïf - finds himself the butt of the joke when removed from the comfort of his own social stratum and placed within an environment that necessitates a certain level of order, privilege and efficiency.  This juxtaposition between the character's own unashamedly unaffected demeanour against the more "hoity-toity" attitude of his new surroundings, provides the film with its comic set-up.  As the initial narrative draws cheap laughs from the havoc and disruption caused by Pitkin's well-intentioned buffoonery, it is the over-the-top reactions of indignation of the supporting characters that ultimately turns the joke against these oppressors.  The film exposes, through the mistreatment of Pitkin, the often cruel and discriminatory exploitation of the layperson by any close-minded establishment, be it government, industry or military.

The physical comedy, which throughout the film makes full use of Wisdom's near-acrobatic ability to run, jump and hurl himself recklessly through moments of pantomime-like silliness, is genuinely unsurpassed in its invention, but really, it's the personal context of the film that gives the slapstick a greater emotional weight.  In On the Beat, the hope and longing of the central character to become a celebrated policeman like his father before him, propels the narrative, but also gives purpose to these extended set-pieces, the madcap plot and the "Walter Mitty-like" fantasy sequences that establish the character as a hopeless dreamer.  It infuses the comedy with a delicate sadness that only adds to the other elements of romance and whimsy, which in turn, categorise and define the typical Wisdom approach.

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Roselyne and the Lions [Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1989]:

Initial viewing, 29th of January, 2013.

In 2012, I was finally able to tick-off one of those obscure "Holy Grail" titles that had long since eluded me.  The film was Moon in the Gutter (1982) by Jean-Jacques Beineix.  This year (2013), I repeated the same feat by experiencing another of those longed-for titles that had otherwise remained unseen.  The same director's forgotten masterpiece, Roselyne and the Lions.  While I enjoyed Moon in the Gutter as both an oddity and an expression of what Godard once called "pure cinema", the film was ultimately too alienating (by design) to have any greater impact beyond the surface of its ornate and often dazzling production design and impeccable cinematography.  With "Roselyne" however, there was no such issue with commitment.  The allure of the work was instantaneous!

Throughout the film, Beineix uses the exhibition of lion taming as a metaphor for the often destructive impulses that drive the modern relationship.  This is a courtship where anger, jealousy, passion and pain threaten to obliterate the bond that exists between two people, driven close to insanity by their obsessions and insecurities.  The spectacle of the film - where the 'tamer' and 'trainer' attempt to control these wild beasts that stalk and prowl the barred perimeter of the cage - works as a visual representation of the characters' love for one another.  A mad love, or impetuous love, that is all-powerful and all-consuming.  A dangerous and destructive love that seems volatile enough to spill out into violence or to blossom, flower-like, into something more rich and beautiful.  A display of chaste emotion, which, in its graceful theatricality, becomes art.

Viewed in its complete, 180 minute director's cut, the experience of Beineix's film and the work of the actors when face-to-face with these ferocious lions that respond and perform to their every command, is breathtaking in its authenticity.  The combination of this reckless, dazzling demonstration of technique, in contrast with the more intimate, character-driven story, moves as much as it enthrals.  In a year defined by the CGI excess of films like The Desolation of Smaug, Gravity and Pacific Rim, it seems increasingly more difficult for an audience to actually believe in what they've seen.  The thrill of "Roselyne" is as such in its legitimacy.  Like the best work of Werner Herzog, this is a film that exists as an effort to film the un-filmable.  To capture something real and miraculous on-screen.

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Nouvelle vague [Jean-Luc Godard, 1990]:

Return viewing, 18th of February, 2013.

This was something I've returned to recently.  I first saw it a long time ago - 2006, maybe - when I was still at university.  I remember borrowing it from the campus library on a badly damaged video recording and finding it almost impossible to make sense of the subtitles through the worn-out tracking of the VHS.  As far as the memory goes, I recall more than anything being transfixed by Godard's framing and camera movements and by the beauty of Domiziana Giordano - who I recognised as the actress from Tarkovsky's masterpiece Nostalghia (1983) and from Neil Jordan's blockbuster Anne Rice adaptation Interview with the Vampire (1994) - even if many of the more subtle or intellectual nuances of the film itself were eventually lost in translation.

I still enjoyed the film a great deal.  I'd already become a fan of Godard in 2002 when I saw A Woman is A Woman (1961), Le Mépris (1963) and Éloge de l'amour (2001) almost back to back during the course of the school holidays.  I wouldn't become a true Godard "fanatic" until early 2008, but this was undoubtedly the start of the journey.  Returning to the film now, with a greater comprehension of its author's work, I understood the intentions of the film a little clearer and could see through the more inscrutable or elusive aspects to the themes and emotions beneath.  On the surface, Nouvelle vague seems suitably impenetrable; awash as it is with quotations, references and attempts to dismantle the narrative or the connection between the audience and the work through disruptive and experimental filmmaking techniques.  This is the snare of Godard's iconoclastic methodology that tends to turn the more casual viewer away.  However, the elliptical and poetic nature of the work is worth persevering with, if only to savour the hypnotic grandeur of its sounds and images, or the expressions of its actors and its text.

In persisting with the film and approaching it on a level where every cut, sound and image is expressive of something greater, the sentiments and ideas of the film become clear.  Though there are further allusions to class and the economy, and the presentation of the house itself, with its various layers and hierarchical structures as a microcosm for society in general, it is the story of the couple in crisis that really gives the film its reason for being.  As is characteristic of Godard, the couple is symbolic - their inability to meet, literally and metaphorically, speaks to a greater inability that goes beyond the narrative intrigues of the film - but this aspect exists without diminishing the pain, passion and confusion that makes their relationship so affecting and true.

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The Howling [Joe Dante, 1981]:

Initial viewing, 19th of February, 2013.

In last year's equivalent of the end of year list, I incorrectly dated the re-watch of Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) as the 11th of March, 2012.  It was actually the 11th of December.  The date is significant, because it was in seeing Gremlins 2 for the first time since childhood that I was able to perceive Dante's work in a richer, more enlightened context.  It set me off on a journey of rediscovery that has continued throughout the subsequent year.  This reclaiming of Dante's work reached something of an apex back in February, when I watched and then re-watched three of the director's greatest films: Matinee (1993), Homecoming (2005) and the work in question.  These three films, when seen in the context of Gremlins 2, confirmed Dante's reputation as one of the great subversive pop-artists of the last four decades.

While The Howling functions primarily as a homage to the werewolf genre - its quotations from The Wolf Man (1941) and The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) for instance establishing a certain self-awareness of tone that predates the analogous genre deconstructions of Quentin Tarantino by more than a decade - there is still so much more to the film than a simple play of references.  In establishing their narrative, Dante and his screenwriter John Sayles use the idea of lycanthropy to effectively explore the concept of "the beast within"; creating a context for the film in which the initial attacks are perceived by the media to be the work of a vicious sex-killer, and where the film's primary setting, "the colony" - a riff on the then-cultural trend for health spas and communal retreats - is used to lampoon the very conservative idea of repression, both emotional and psychological, as it pertains not only to the subversion of the werewolf mythology, but to the often transgressive nature of the horror film in general.

However, it is in the film's last minute descent into full-blown Looney Tunes satire that The Howling reaches a level of genuine transcendence.  As the werewolf begins its graphic and harrowing transformation during the broadcast of a live TV news bulletin, Dante cuts to the reactions of a stunned audience watching the scene from the safety of their respective living rooms.  The full range of responses are intended to mirror the reactions of the movie audience when faced with the same scene (some are shocked, others laugh at the absurdity, while others can't believe their eyes).  In this penultimate moment, the filmmaker seeks to question the authenticity of the recorded image.  The idea that seeing is no longer believing for an audience worn down by the exploitations of the global media age.

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The Oak [Laila Pakalniņa, 1997]:

Initial viewing, 24th of February, 2013.

The first image of the film introduces the idea of the oak as "protagonist"; a central figure, observing; connected to everything.  A short on-screen caption then informs us that the tree in this village (in the Seja region of Latvia, where the film takes place) is seven-hundred years old.  As would occur in Pakalniņa's later film, Teodors (2006), a living symbol of age and wisdom is being presented as the silent witness to the daily struggles and encounters of a small village almost forgotten by the modern world.  In Teodors, the witness was the film's title character; an elderly man who watched the various comings and goings of his small village from a bench outside the local bus stop; the visible scars of age and experience marked as the wrinkled crevices upon his face.

The presence of Teodors - his existence as a relic, out of step, out of time - worked to connect the past to the present; his own continuing subsistence as a reminder to these people of the things that came before.  In The Oak, the tree - this still "living" thing, which has existed for centuries, ever present - fulfils the same social and narrative function as the age'd man.  It has weathered the march of time.  It perseveres - remains standing, stoical - out-lasting the lives of others.  It is a genuine part of this community and as such effected by the same hardships and sorrows faced by its citizens, albeit, in a less tangible way.

In creating the film, the intention of Pakalniņa is essentially to document the daily lives and experiences of these characters who struggle to survive in a place where work is limited and even a warm cup of coffee or a hot bath have become a luxury that few can afford.  In having these people introduce themselves - establishing the context of life in the village, their stories and experiences - Pakalniņa is connecting the setting to its inhabitants.  However, she's also presenting the tree as the eternal symbol of resolution and continued existence in order to create a point.  Times may be hard for these people (here documented by Pakalniņa's attentive, sympathetic camera, which transforms moments of actuality into frames of vivid still life), but the preservation of this tree - as an emblem of personal endurance - provides hope.

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How I Won the War [Richard Lester, 1967]:

Initial viewing, 26th of February, 2013.

It took me several months to clarify what I wanted to say about Lester's film.  Not necessarily because it's a challenging or even difficult film to make sense of (although certainly it "flouts" narrative convention), but because so much of its ability to provoke a response from the audience results from the often difficult to define juxtaposition of horrific, real-life stock-footage of second world war atrocity with scenes of ironic pastiche, comic parody and a filmmaking approach that is intended to break the fourth wall at every conceivable opportunity.  To put it into a more understandable context, think of it like this...  What if the Monty Python team were to update Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to a WWII setting and used the film to offset their own characteristically surreal sense of humour with a solemn anger and serious bitterness that sought to express a genuine sense of outrage at the way the war had been exploited by institutions looking to turn the suffering and sacrifice of soldiers into sensationalism and profit.

The image posted above sort of gets to the point of what Lester's work is suggesting; depicting, on the one hand, a very real and very disturbing tragedy of a soldier maimed in combat, but presenting it in a way that is almost absurdly matter-of-fact.  Throughout the film, the violence (both factual and fictional) is depicted in a way that is no less shocking than any other motion-picture on the same subject and theme, but instead of adorning such sequences with a melodramatic bombast or hand-wringing sentimentality equivalent to that of the films of Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg, the scenes are frequently treated by characters as nothing more than a mild inconvenience.  Soldiers even return from the dead and continue fighting as colour-coded revenants; their entire bodies painted garish colours as if to suggest that death is the only way to break free of the conformity of the uniform, but also giving these characters the same appearance as one of those miniature plastic toy soldiers made famous as supporting characters in the John Lasseter film, Toy Story (1995).

It could be said that Lester's film exaggerates the absurdity of war in order to create a political commentary, but this is only partly true.  What the film does, more specifically, is exaggerate the absurdity of the war film, or anti-war film, as both a genre and approach.  In using humour to cut through the solemnity of the subject matter and to create a sense of over-the-top, almost 'cartoonish' insanity, Lester and his screenwriter Charles Wood are taking apart the clichés of the war movie that they find to be the most appalling and disingenuous.  This is why Lester often referred to the film as an "anti anti-war movie"; the distinction making explicit the idea that the film was not intended to make fun of war, or to diminish or devalue the struggles and sacrifices of those that fought it, but instead attempting to reveal the insincerity and the hypocrisy of the way war is often depicted through the media, and in the cinema especially.

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The Territory [Raúl Ruiz, 1981]:

Initial viewing, 4th of March, 2013.

The Territory is a work that I'd been eager to see ever since I first heard about it in relation to Wim Wenders' The State of Things (1982).  The story goes that the Ruiz film ran out of money.  Wenders was visiting some friends who were working for Ruiz and in order to keep the crew from leaving decided to make a film of his own.  Using the cast and crew assembled by Ruiz, Wenders made a film that commented directly on the situation - in which a group of actors and technicians are left stranded at a resort in Portugal after their producer makes off with the cash - while also adding a more personal subtext that sought to express his own frustrations with producer Francis Ford Coppola during the making of the ill-fated Hammett (1982).

As my knowledge of Ruiz and his work began to grow, my obsession with seeing this phantom film became even greater.  In finally seeing the film this past March, I was happy to confirm that the experience was exactly what I'd hoped it would be.  The Territory is as mysterious, maddening and magical as one might expect from the director responsible for films like Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978), City of Pirates (1983) and The Nucingen House (2008), with the same elaborate style, hypnotic atmosphere and puzzle-box narrative used to enliven what initially seems to be no more than a standard exploitation movie.

At its most direct, the narrative of Ruiz's film involves a group of young professionals on a camping holiday who become lost and disoriented in a forest that eventually takes on an almost supernatural quality (leading to a psychological deterioration that is intended to function on a level of social satire).  One can draw obvious parallels with a more mainstream film, such as Deliverance (1972), or even the overt-horror iconography of Friday the 13th (1980), however the real subtext of Ruiz's work is essentially much closer to that of Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967), where the descent of its characters into savage cannibalistic aggressors becomes expressive of both the decline of western civilisation and the madness of the modern-age.

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I Confess [Alfred Hitchcock, 1953]:

Initial viewing, 10th of March, 2013.

At the time I first saw Hitchcock's perhaps most underrated masterpiece, the mordantly titled I Confess, the 'Viewing Log' series was already reaching an end and was about to merge with the 'Key Films' project, and in the madness of all that nonsense the intention of writing about the film was seemingly lost.  I tried to come back to it again in October, but by this time the impetus had gone.  The best I could do was a veiled reference in the title of another post...  It was unfortunate, since I Confess both moved and enthralled me more so than any other film directed by Hitchcock, including his iconic masterworks, such as Rear Window (1954) and The Birds (1963).  The film has all the trademarks of the director's greatest work - the peerless filmmaking, the tension, the ambiguity - but with a solemnity and an austerity that made the theatrical and largely sombre development of the drama feel like a departure.

Though some will no doubt balk at the suggestion, the film for me evoked the spirit of Hitchcock by way of Robert Bresson.  It wasn't just the religious aspect of the narrative or the questions raised on the notions of piety, conviction and guilt that seemed to circle back to a film like Diary of a Country Priest (1951) or even the subsequent Pickpocket (1959), but the tone of the film.  The comparatively more restrained and static approach, which at first seems to work against the immediate expectations of what a Hitchcock film "is" or should achieve, but eventually allows the director to better engage the audience, not least in the characteristic scenes of anxiety and suspense, but in the emotional life of his protagonist and in the moral dilemmas that occur as a result of his plight.

In approaching the film as a work of suspense, it is the blamelessness of the character (and his numbing sense of conviction) that becomes the literal "bomb under the table."  The audience is aware of his innocence from the very first scene, but the characters that populate this world are unconvinced.  They read and misread past experiences and statements made with the intention to protect until they became like the ever tightening noose around the neck of this man whose faith binds his words in silence.  As the viewer becomes further invested in the life and sacrifices of this character and in his unwavering belief (in the face of such hideous lies and accusations), we yearn, with all honesty, for a last minute reprieve; a confession, from anyone still willing to do the right thing; to intercede in the absence of God, on behalf of the innocent.

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Wanda Gosciminska, a Textile Worker [Wojciech Wiszniewski, 1975]:

Initial viewing, 12th of March, 2013.

This was the first of two films by Wojciech Wiszniewski that I saw during the course of the last twelve months.  The other, ABC Book/The Primer (1976), was also a work of extraordinary vision and originality and could have easily made the list were it not for the more significant experience of the film in question.  What elevated Wanda Gosciminska, a Textile Worker above the other Wiszniewski film was ultimately the clarity of its ideas (at least in relation to its strange and often provocative imagery) as well as the more personal or emotive feeling that its subject enthused.  Unlike the subsequent film - which often felt like a series of disconnected sketches, which, when viewed in totality, evoke a specific point - the work in question has a markedly more graspable and definable narrative as communicated by its central character.

The film chronicles the life-story of its protagonist - this determined worker, who, through the course of her reminiscence, becomes the prevailing symbol of not just socialism, but a personification of the industrial revolution - however, it does so in a highly imaginative and unconventional way.  As such, defining the work of Wiszniewski, as a filmmaker, is difficult.  His films purport to be documentaries, but are presented in a highly stylised and cryptic approach, using intense stylisations.  The places, people, statistics and ideas put forth in these films are factual and true, but are embellished and exaggerated through the process of filmmaking in an effort to create a greater level of social commentary.  While conventionally such stylisations would deny the film its authenticity, the direction actually makes Wiszniewski's point more clear and precise.

By reducing Wanda's life and her experiences to a series of representations, the filmmaker creates a form of narrative criticism that functions on the same level as the illustrations in a children's book.  It's not merely a case of providing a diagram to the memory of the film's events, but instead interpreting these events and creating a visual adaption that is larger than life and as such expressive of something even greater than the reality.  Through this particular stylisation, Wanda Gosciminska becomes a film where the images "speak"; communicating through the surface of the thing (which is surreal, captivating and symbolic in presentation) a particular dilemma; a condition, both moral and socio-political. Through exaggeration, the film is able to find the satirical subtext of the presentation, without turning the efforts of its protagonist, real or fictitious, into a joke.