One-Hundred Favourite Films - Part Seven

Ongoing response to The Dancing Image "100 (of Your) Favourite Movies" meme-that's-not-a-meme, presented here in a loosely alphabetical order. I'm posting the series in reverse formation in an attempt to maintain the original continuity, from A to Z.

Mauvais sang
Directed by Leos Carax - 1986

With some films, the experience cannot be explained, only felt. As much as I try to put into words some semblance of what these films are about, how they work and why I love them as much as I do, there is always that struggle to do justice to the true experience, which is personal, and difficult to define. With Mauvais sang, I could talk about its ambition and imagination; the gestures towards the poetic realism of filmmakers like Epstein, Vigo and Grémillon; the combination of B-movie noir and impressionist science-fiction (which recalls the Godard of Alphaville (1965) in its presentation of love in a world where the physical act of love has been made unattainable); or the feeling of it: the progression between scenes that are either funny, astounding, romantic or moving.

However, to describe the film in such a way would not do justice to the real feeling that is experienced. The recollections of a relationship, however vague, inform every scene, every word and every movement. The film as a work - as a physical object - reminds me of my own amour fou - mon "Petite Lise" - who loved its bursts of movement, its folly and its declarations, almost as much as I; who saw in it something that brought to mind our own sadness and embraced it, like the characters on-screen. To see the film now is to re-experience that affection in every expression of these characters, their actions and reactions, and in the film's sweeping gestures, which capture a feeling of what it is to love and to be loved.

Metropolis
Directed by Fritz Lang - 1927

In its construction, the city presents the two ideological perspectives established by the film's socialist-leaning epigram, which reads: 'Head' and 'Hands' need a mediator. The mediator between 'Head' and 'Hands' must be 'the Heart.' The city of the film is, in its design, a manmade barrier between these two spheres of society, ensuring that 'Head' and 'Hands' are forever separated, physically, by the structure of the thing; those divides of class, gender and generation made explicit in the very foundation of the world. Through the inadvertent actions of its two protagonists - Freder, son of Fredersen, and the enigmatic Maria - a link between the two words is finally forged, turning the city itself into the beating heart that drives both factions of this so-called Metropolis; this labyrinth of the mind.

However, the vision of the city is not only a mediator for its inhabitants, but inevitably becomes a kind of mediator for its own creators; a link between the politics of Thea von Harbou and the spectacle of Fritz Lang. If writer von Harbou saw the drudgery of the workers as something deplorable, director Lang transforms it into something truly terrifying. A vision of hell, where the workers feed a machine that becomes, in the eyes of the protagonist, like a monster, devastating in its ferocity. While the political aspects of the film are still relevant, it is the pure storytelling of Metropolis that leaves the greatest impression; the manifestation of this world that Lang and his technicians so vividly create is still, after almost a century, a genuine sight to behold.

Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder - 1975

We contemplate the question: Why does Herr Küsters run amok? As a quotation, it sounds like the start of an appalling joke (and in many respects it is!) though one necessary to draw a line of influence from this film to an earlier one, also associated with Fassbinder, which ended with an explosion of fury and devastation that seemed to anticipate the unseen act of violence that begins the film in question. What is most cruel about the construction of the film is the way Fassbinder has his characters - this small family of aged mother, doting son and imperious daughter-in-law - just going about their usual domestic activities, oblivious to the terrible tragedy taking place on the other side of town.

The film reinforces Fassbinder's reputation as one of the great 'exploitation' directors. Not so much in his technique - which has little in common with filmmakers like Joe D'Amato or Larry Cohen - but in his continual interest in the manipulation of characters too vulnerable or trusting to recognise when the forces of a system far beyond their comprehension is conspiring against them. In Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven, Fassbinder uses the story of this elderly woman's bleak descent into loneliness, resentment and eventual criminality to condemn the German culture of the 1970s; taking aim at the ineffectual left-wing intelligentsia, armchair terrorists, tabloid press and his own generation's ignorance and greed in contrast with the quiet stoicism and questionable loyalty of the martyred matriarch of the title.

It is easy to see the crime of Herr Küsters and the reactions to it as a comment on how the Germany of Fassbinder's generation had distanced itself from the sins of the father(land); refusing to acknowledge the atrocity of the holocaust on a human level, ignoring it, and therefore allowing the opportunity for history to repeat itself; a fear implicit in the violent conflicts taking place between left and right-wing political groups throughout the 1970s. In the absence of the "father", Mother Küsters becomes the real culprit, the only link to a man that can no longer be held accountable, and as such - a scapegoat? - shunned and ignored, denied any sympathy; guilty by association. Her downfall, chronicled throughout, is shattering to see.

Mulholland Drive
Directed by David Lynch - 2001

For Lynch, there is the surface, the thing that is presented as 'truth', and then there is the world beneath the surface, the dark despair that exists at the wounded heart of everything. In the opening sequence of his earlier film Blue Velvet (1986), Lynch illustrated this idea with a vivid montage of small-town suburban life - a world of fixed-grins, picket fences and saccharine '50s pop - cut-short by the sight of an elderly man falling to the ground in the throes of a violent seizure, and a slow malignant tracking shot through the undergrowth, revealing the writhing worms, festering maggots, and a severed human ear.

In some ways, the narrative of the film in question could be seen as a continuation of this earlier sequence, where Lynch establishes a surface projection of how things appear, or need to appear, and then the reality beneath. The two 'realms' offer two sides of a single story, where failure and disappointment are transformed in the mind of a central character into a waif's dream of Hollywood stardom, full of mystery and adventure. In this sense, the film is an obvious continuation of the same territory explored in Lynch's other great films, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and Lost Highway (1997), where a significant event in the lives of his characters causes a literal psychological metamorphosis; turning the story into a series of figurative gestures that hide the clues to an unfortunate chain of events. While the two preceding films are undoubtedly great works, there is a noticeable process of refinement in the development of Mulholland Drive, where the games played with the narrative and the usual interjections of horror, slapstick and soft-core erotica are not used to obfuscate or to confuse the audience, but to reveal hidden depths.

On the surface, the film is of course a captivating mystery; a genuine modern-day noir built around its two unlikely heroines who traverse this frequently sun-dappled Hollywood playground in search of the clues to an arcane conspiracy, and finding instead the hollow bones of a terrifying affair. And yet beneath the surface, the film is a heartbreaking psychological study; one that exposes emotions and ideas that never merely adorn the more characteristic moments of surrealism, but transcend them; turning what could've been a cheaply provocative and transparent experiment in self-reference into a genuine work of art.

Muriel
Directed by Alain Resnais - 1963

Subtitled 'The Time of a Return', Muriel is a film about memory, or more appropriately, about the past as something pervasive, like a shadow walking in-step with each character; something that we're unable to escape. Though other aspects of the work are just as intriguing, it is the film's continual emphasis on time and recollection - and how these concerns can be related through the power of the moving image to capture and record - that Resnais and his scriptwriter Jean Cayrol return to; creating a film where the formalist experiments - the editing and the placement of the camera - attempt to disarm the viewer; showing the capacity for the medium to manipulate and mislead, but also to suggest hidden truths.

The 'Muriel' of the title is not the lead character, as we might expect, but a name that haunts the character's stepson Bernard; a young man still traumatised by his experiences during the conflict in Algeria. In this sense, the scars of war - the lingering traces of it - becomes another great theme of the film; explicit in the battle-marked ruins of Boulogne-sur-Mer where the story takes place and implicit in several interactions between characters, who throughout the film seem to hide behind a facade of middle-class contentment, as if trying to maintain a sense of pre-war normality; almost as if life before the war had continued, uninterrupted.

When Cayrol and Resnais eventually reveal the true story of 'Muriel' - this character that seems to embody, in memory, the very spirit of the film and its restless observations on the themes aforementioned - the effect is truly devastating. The film itself - in its necessary contrast between sound (Bernard's painful confession) and image (a montage of 8mm footage of soldiers languishing between battle) - becomes a eulogy to this young woman, but also a means of expressing the great suffering of those made mute by the ravages inflicted by this stonewalled deceit. This is a film that offers a profound comment on the nature of atrocity, how we live with it, and how the attempt to ignore it, or to put it to one side, is the greatest indignity of all.

My Darling Clementine
Directed by John Ford - 1946

In the broadest terms, the story of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral doesn't interest me, and yet this is what the film appears to be about. However, beneath the surface of this historical fiction, there is a film about loss; about the loss of a brother. As an only child I've often envied those with close ties to their siblings and that sadness felt by Wyatt Earp after the death of his brother during the first act of the film is something that I can almost relate to. The feeling of wanting something but never having it is sometimes equal to having something and then losing it. The film, in its mood and sense of momentum, is haunted by this loss - the loss of a brother but also the loss of innocence, or an ideal - turning even the burgeoning love story between Earp and the character of Clementine Carter into something charged with the anticipation of a tragedy.

This same feeling of grief is inherent in Ford's direction, with the staging of scenes and the framing of shots, compositionally, emphasising a certain abstract stillness; where interactions between characters are turned into ghostly encounters, intrusions and stolen moments, caught like images from a phantom documentary, "of the period" (though no such documentary could exist). It is the authenticity of these images, the dirt and the grime and the sense of lives being lived, that creates this feeling of something credible, emotionally and cinematically, even if the story is pure fabrication.

Nostalghia
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky - 1983

Any discussion of the themes behind the film should really begin with the title, which establishes upfront the overwhelming feeling of loss and the personal displacement that hangs above the lives of these characters, suspended, like the sword of Damocles waiting to drop. However, this is not a film about 'nostalgia' in the sense of being a 'nostalgic work' - like for example Amarcord (1973) or Radio Days (1987), where specific memories of places and people are exaggerated on screen as they are in the mind - but rather an attempt to understand the feelings behind this nostalgia. The loneliness, disruption and dissatisfaction that compels these characters to take shelter in a crumbling Italian village, where each relic of a past existence uncovers deep reminders of their own tragic despair.

The character in Tarkovsky's film is, like the filmmaker himself, in exile. Unable to return home, this character finds himself haunted by past recollections; memories of figures framed within a desolate landscape, an old house and a shroud of fog, like the fog of memory, obscuring everything. These images suggest some possible clue to deciphering the true feelings of this character, which, as ever with Tarkovsky, seem impossible to define. For this is a poet's impression of his own great sorrow, suggested throughout by the solitude of the village, the dust and decay, and his own dealings with characters similarly haunted; consigned to their fate, like the defiant 'mad man' Domenico, or like Eugenia, desperate for an escape.

The tone of the film throughout is sombre and pensive. At times, the imagery suggests a continuation of the oppressive, post-apocalyptic misery of the director's previous film Stalker (1979) - or even a precursor to the genuine fear of atomic annihilation featured in his final work, The Sacrifice (1986) - but it's always the feeling of the film, the emotions of it, that draw us in. The emphasis on long takes - where the camera moves about these characters, observing them, presenting each shift between reality and fantasy, past and present, as a genuine movement between worlds - turns the experience of the film into a waking dream. A dream of home shared by each protagonist (and by the audience as well) that is impossible to define and even more difficult to reclaim.

Notre musique
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard - 2004

A film composed of three movements, like a symphony; the association reflecting the greater connotations of the title: the voice, a means of expression and communication: "our music?" Each movement of the film is a representation of a different argument on the nature of war, presented by means of a specific cinematic approach. The three movements - montage, dramatisation and allegory - act as interpretations of the three kingdoms of Dante's the Divine Comedy - Hell, Purgatory and Paradise - creating a single narrative. One that develops like a series of unconscious thoughts, moving, like characters through the rubble of places or the ruin of existence; never acting, but reacting as everyday people might when faced with the reality of war; the injustice of it.

In its rolling montage of violence and devastation - and with the burnt ruins of Sarajevo still standing as a solitary witness to the last great horror of the 20th century - Godard asks the question: "how can we live?" The audience responds: "with our fingers in our ears and our eyes tightly closed." The inquisitive nature of the film is never aggressive or didactic, like the Godard of the 1960s, but gently probing. The aim is to evoke emotions and ideas through sounds and images, creating something that moves between moments of poetic abstraction, wicked satire and affecting psychological study; presenting the atrocity of war and the folly of terrorism without condescension, but also gesturing lightly towards something hopeful; a vision of paradise, tranquil but exclusive, pastoral but closed-in...

The final movement, which acts as a kind of free adaptation the final act of Godard's earlier Week End (1967) - turning that film's depiction of violence and immorality in the Garden of Eden into an Eden of autocratic efficiency - uses this beautiful bucolic setting to create a contrast between something natural and pure and something corrupt; a system built on control and segregation, like the world itself. Although stunning in its presentation, this coda, both satirically and sympathetically, shows us the paradise that awaits these martyrs, and in its own subtle way shows us where the folly of terrorism ultimately leads. A dream of heaven as a place where nothing ever happens.

One from the Heart
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola - 1982

I suppose it makes sense that a film about romantic folly has itself become known as the great romantic folly of its director's career. While Coppola's film may have yet to shed its reputation as the wildly ambitious extravagance that tarnished his reputation and almost destroyed his career, it remains, for me at least, one of the director's greatest films.

On the surface, One from the Heart is as pure a work of cinematic imagination as one could ever hope to see. A vivid extravaganza, full of expressive colours, dazzling sets, theatrical transitions, musical numbers, circus routines and a poet's portrayal of love that finds even the most personal or intimate of feelings transformed into a spectacle of old-Hollywood-style decadence or Cocteau-like verse . However, beneath the surface of this display of magic mirrors, high-wire acts and allusions to MGM musicals there is a story about failure and disappointment, about spent-time and lost chances. A film about the difficulty faced by this couple in their attempts to understand one another; to look into the eyes of the other and see the reason why they first fell in love, and not just a sad reminder of their own disillusionment staring back at them.

Through this contrast between the stylisation of the form and the coarseness of the protagonists, Coppola's film becomes more than just a frivolous fantasy, but a moving and intelligent deconstruction of a relationship; where the carnival spirit and decadent glamour of the world created only reinforces the emptiness shared by these characters, the lack of excitement and adventure. In this respect, Coppola's film is ultimately about the pursuit of love as a physical space. In the arms of another we can accept our situation, or at least find beauty in the world around us, as opposed to dreaming of impossible things.

Onibaba
Directed by Kaneto Shindô - 1964

What I'm always left with is the impression of scenes; the heat, the closeness, the sense of space. Although the story is certainly engaging, it is the feeling of the film - the energy of it - that for me makes the experience so extraordinary and difficult to describe. The atmosphere of the location, barren and claustrophobic, is defined by the imprisoning blur of the marshland, with its tall reeds, which - when presented across the full-width of Kiyomi Kuroda's mesmerising 'scope frame - become like a wall that exists, literally or figuratively, between two realms. A wall that divides these characters, closing in on them, trapping them emotionally, physically and psychologically between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

Everything that happens in the film unfolds as if these characters are in-limbo; each moment held or suspended, like a scream of agony, or one of ecstasy? Although terrifying in its ferocity, the film is also surprisingly sensual. That heat and the closeness of the bodies within the frame, half-naked and wet with sweat, creates the feeling of something primal, even erotic! A heightened emotional state that turns the film into a prolonged nightmare, suggesting an interpretation of lust and jealousy that is almost supernatural.

One-Hundred Favourite Films - Part Eight

Ongoing response to The Dancing Image "100 (of Your) Favourite Movies" meme-that's-not-a-meme, presented here in a loosely alphabetical order. I'm posting the series in reverse formation in an attempt to maintain the original continuity, from A to Z.

Ondine
Directed by Neil Jordan - 2009

A mournful piano chord is struck. The sound of it reverberates, becoming the siren's call to the fisherman, alone and at sea. The landscape, all rolling green hills and black jagged rocks that mark the divide between the land and the water - between his world and hers - suggests something mythical. This is the introduction to a story, told by the man to his daughter. He begins nervously: "once upon a time..." "Does it always have to be once upon a time" she says, cutting through the necessity for these stories to distance themselves from the everyday reality, becoming something fabled, and as a result, less real. The story eventually told by the man is the same story unfolding on screen.

Even before the fisherman has pulled from the water the beautiful young woman - caught in his net as a mess of long pale limbs and damp tangled hair - the film is suggesting this contrast between the reality, a world where a single father must work hard to pay for an operation to save his ailing daughter, and a world of myths and magic, where this woman, whose name is taken literally "from the water", will ensnare him in a story of his own creation. However, what happens when the daughter interjects, telling her own story? No longer informed by the fisherman's romantic yearning or desire to provide an escape for his little girl, but by her own fears and sickness.

The subsequent unravelling of the plot, with its back-and-forth rifts between romantic fable, poignant tragedy and violent noir, suggests the ever shifting perspective of these dual narrators, blurring the boundaries between what is felt by the characters and their own attempts to defuse their concerns by framing them within the reassuring context of a bedtime story. The films of Neil Jordan continually push this relationship between reality and fiction, and Ondine - a film where each new narrator presents a new 'voice', expressed via references to a specific genre - is his most complex work of meta-fiction since The Company of Wolves (1984), and arguably one of his most beautiful films to date.

Only Yesterday
Directed by Isao Takahata - 1991

I recognise a lot of myself in the film's protagonist, the twenty-something office worker Taeko Okajima, and her escape to the countryside as respite from the emptiness of her everyday life. What I recognise most is that sense of anxiety. The feeling of being lost or adrift, of wanting more out of life than the job, the house, the family; those natural expectations of adult life that we're supposed to strive for; that mark us out as successful, well-balanced individuals in the eyes of society, regardless of whether or not such concepts or concerns are emotionally gratifying or personally fulfilling.

Through Taeko and her restless examination of her own childhood memories, which are an attempt to better understand the hopelessness and the disenchantment that make life for her a constant sorrow, the film beautifully captures that feeling of nostalgic yearning that comes to the best of us when we reach a certain age, between the carefree adventures and discoveries of childhood and the commitments and responsibilities of later life. As a character, Taeko is happy to simply exist; to work for the joy of working. Not for financial gain or social status, but to share moments and interactions with likeminded people; to be close to the land and the beauty of nature; to recapture that childhood feeling of endless summer days before the crippling weight of maturity, when everything was simple.

With Only Yesterday, Takahata and his collaborators have produced a film that is every bit as 'human' in spirit as his earlier masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies (1988), and no less moving. An intimate, perfectly observed film, full of atmosphere, emotion and depth, where the adult Taeko's introspective journey into the memories of her childhood is powerful enough to compel the audience to contemplate their own recollections of the past and their dreams for the future.

Ordet
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer - 1955

I emerged from the experience of the film, eyes blurred, senses stunned in silent sorrow. I couldn't believe what I'd just witnessed. I can't even explain it now. On paper, the film could be seen as a fairly conventional family drama, full of the usual melodramatic interjections and plays of deep emotion that attempt to inspire a connection in the mind of the audience, eliciting sympathy or understanding, as melodramas often do. But there is an intensity to Dreyer's film that elevates the story far beyond the ordinary; a sense - shared by both the audience and the characters on screen - of seeing something beyond explanation; a genuine miraculous event.

For me, the effect of the film was enormous. The sense of pace, the stillness, the rigorous framing of objects and events, and the austerity of these characters numbed my soul, lulled me into a feeling of total vulnerability. By the time the film had reached its final act I was on the edge of my seat, stomach in knots, too scared to exhale in the event that any subtle change in the air might destroy the feeling of near-religious transcendence taking place right before me. By the end of the film I was emotionally exhausted. The tears broke free and rolled down my face. Finally I felt what Nana must have felt when she sat in the cinema watching The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) in Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (1962).

In instances where the experience of the film is beyond my grasp, there's always the urge to invoke Godard: 'What we cannot speak about, we must pass over, in silence.' To experience Ordet is to experience the true power of cinema. That is, cinema as an act of faith. The act of faith required by these characters to believe in the unbelievable is mirrored by the act of faith required by the audience to invest in the subject of the film and embrace it, without cynicism. To approach the film with an open mind and an open heart.

Out of the Past
Directed by Jacques Tourneur - 1947

For me, the thing that elevates Out of the Past above any other classic film noir of the studio era, is the mournful direction of Jacques Tourneur. As a director, Tourneur brings to the film the same sense of melancholy and gothic ambience that transformed his earlier supernatural mysteries from potentially lurid little scare-stories into tortured psychological studies of warped minds and characters in torment. In Out of the Past, the feeling of great sorrow, or that faint line between the cruelty of the environment and the unspoken suffering of the protagonist, are brought to the very centre of the thing; not simply there to give added weight or subtext to the development of the plot as they might in a more conventional film noir, but actually defining it.

This is a film about longing, about these characters attempting to find love in a loveless place, or to exist, without becoming numbed to the violence, brutality, cynicism and greed of this literally seething underworld, with its betrayals and deceits. Though it plays with the recognisable iconography of the genre, there is a tension to the film that goes far beyond the requirements of the story. A gravity to the interactions between characters, which carry a feeling of sustained, fatalistic despair; as if the wrath incurred by the central character will not simply result in death, but in something potentially more sinister. Here, the relationship between Douglas and Mitchum becomes more than just that of a crime boss and his stooge, but a genuine deal with the devil.

In this sense, even when working outside of the conventions of the supernatural genre, Tourneur's film still feels like an eerie encounter between ghosts in a world of shadows. His approach, as agonizing and atmospheric as in the films Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), seems to transform what could've been a fairly predictable story of deception and double-cross into a psychological drama, where the story emerges - literally 'out of the past' - as these characters remember each moment and encounter, trying to make sense of things as their lives spiral into chaos.

Paris Belongs to Us
Directed by Jacques Rivette - 1961

The first Rivette, and already the great trademarks of his work are presented, fully-formed. The title, which is more a declaration than an adequate description, is the first acknowledgement of the role that Paris will play throughout the director's career, becoming more than just a mere setting, but something greater: a state of mind. In this sense, Paris Belongs to Us is a precursor to the grand adventure of films like Out 1 (1971), Le pont du Nord (1981) and Gang of Four (1989), both in its reliance on arcane conspiracies - which seem to captivate the characters of all Rivette's films - and in that slow thematic descent from playful joie de vivre to suffocating suspicion.

However, the greatest connection between these films is Rivette's use of the city, which here, like in several of the director's later films, becomes a living theatrical space, invaded by a troupe of actors who engage in a series of public rehearsals, providing context for the more mysterious dramas taking place beneath the surface. In the end, the tension, between good-humoured scenes of character interaction and the threat of some possible cataclysmic event, creates a feeling of sustained suspense, suggestive of the final moments of Antonioni's subsequent L'eclisse (1962), which also seemed enthused with a darker undercurrent of cold war paranoia and fear of atomic annihilation.

The Passenger
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni - 1975

"I know a man who was blind. When he was nearly forty he had an operation and regained his sight. At first he was elated. Really high. Faces, colours, landscapes... But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he imagined. No one had ever told him how much dirt there was, how much ugliness... He noticed ugliness everywhere. When he was blind, he used to cross the street alone, with his stick... After he regained his sight, he became afraid. He began to live in darkness. He never left his room. After three years he killed himself."

The identity of 'the passenger' is never made clear. Though one can assume this title refers to the unnamed 'girl' that is first encountered by the protagonist during his stay in Barcelona, and who eventually becomes a travelling companion of sorts on his journey through the second half of the film, it could also just as easily refer to the protagonist himself. The reporter, trading his life for the life of another; choosing to become a 'passenger', emotionally if not physically, through the passage of his own existence; observing it without interaction, and allowing the forces of chance to dictate his inevitable end. In this sense, the story of the blind man is a clue to understanding the progression of this character. A character like many in Antonioni's films who exists as an empty vessel; a shadow, drifting through life, too numbed by the experience of it to engage with a world that crushes him at every turn.

In essence, it is a film about loneliness. The kind of loneliness that isn't simply a symptom of solitude, or of being alone, but a psychological condition that creates a feeling of intense isolation, even in the company of others. The characters in this film are trying to outrun a feeling of disenchantment by embracing the existence of someone else; but these feelings of bitterness and alienations are never really external. No matter how far these characters flee from their own lives, they're unable to escape their own intrinsic feelings of failure, emptiness and disappointment.

The Passion
Directed by Ingmar Bergman - 1969

"I don't imagine I reach into the human soul with this photography. I can only register an interplay of forces, large and small. You look at this picture and imagine things. But it's all nonsense! All play. All poetry. You can't read another person with any claim to certainty. Sometimes not even pain registers as a reaction."

The quoted dialogue seems to offer a vague clue to understanding the film, which is one of Bergman's most difficult and controversial. It is an intense film, full of longing, despair and scenes of quiet anguish, which is deconstructed throughout by the voice of the director, who establishes each scene as if reading from the script, or from occasional on-set interviews with the actors discussing the development of their characters, how they see them, and how the audience should respond to them. These deconstructions, which invite the process of filmmaking into the narrative, exposing the artificiality of these dramas that occur for the benefit of the audience, are disarming - sometimes distracting! - but are necessary to expose the truth behind the usual manipulations that we accept in mainstream cinema, in the same way that the characters attempt to expose the truth behind the deceit of their relationship(s).

As ever with Bergman, private thoughts and fears are made public as the story unfolds. Unravelling, not just in the narrative sense, but emotionally too, as the island where the film takes place becomes an onscreen representation of the characters' fraught psychology, their isolation, and the growing air of violence and persecution that is slowly decimating the landscape, like a plague of madness leading to destruction and annihilation.

Picnic at Hanging Rock
Directed by Peter Weir - 1975

The story is vague and mysterious. If the opening credits didn't suggest some possibility of an actual grounding in recorded history, then we might simply dismiss the scenario as pure fabrication, too extraordinary to believe. However, this question of authenticity is precisely what gives the film its enduring appeal; leaving the audience to speculate about the legitimacy of the disappearances and the surrounding chain of events as a something beyond explanation, uniting the physical and the psychological with the purely supernatural.

The atmosphere of the film certainly suggests the presence of something 'otherworldly', with the mood of the forest - all ethereal, like a fairy story - and the feeling of time standing still, creating an impression of a force of nature greater than anything comprehendible by the human psyche; as if the hanging rock itself has become a sort-of sentinel - a natural 'monolith', in the sense of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - that allows for a communication to take place between worlds. Each moment spent in the shadow of the rock is suspended, compelling these characters into a state of trancelike contemplation, at one with nature, though also at the mercy of it, where "what we see and what we seem are but a dream; a dream within a dream."

The images throughout are haunting; the atmosphere, overwhelming. The sense of this place, the forest, lit by the afternoon rays of the sun, brings to mind a painting like The Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet or Ladies at the Seine by Gustave Courbet. Not just in the continual depiction of idyllic, pastoral scenes of girls in billowing white dresses basking in the soft glow of the sunlight, but in the implied connection between the beauty of nature and this burgeoning (but repressed) sexuality, which might hold the secret to deciphering the whole thing.

Pola X
Directed by Leos Carax - 1999

The subsequent passing of its two lead actors, Guillaume Depardieu and Yekaterina Golubeva, makes the experience of Pola X all the more unsettling. When I first saw the film six years ago it already felt like a work haunted by a great depression; bleak in both subject and approach. But now, more than ever, it has the feel of something truly wounded; a film of immense pain and suffering, where the overwhelming fatalism of its central character is never disguised or subdued by black comedy or ironic detachment, but fully embraced; creating a film not simply about personal misery, but defined by it. This is a film where the only genuine scene of passion takes place between two mangled bodies - reminiscent of figures from the works of Egon Schiele - in a room of total darkness.

Although essentially an adaptation of Melville's controversial Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, Pola X could really be seen as a semi-autobiographical portrait of director Leos Carax; a film in which he reflects on his own position in the world of contemporary French cinema following the critical and commercial disaster of his previous film Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991). In Pierre, he finds a means of expression, presenting a character that might seem, from the outside at least, to have everything at his disposal - a man of great wealth and privilege - but who goes out of his way to destroy any chance of contentment in the pursuit of some indefinable truth. The film, in its conception, is a result of that pursuit.

The Purple Rose of Cairo
Directed by Woody Allen - 1985

As a precursor to the recent Midnight in Paris (2011), The Purple Rose of Cairo introduces the idea of the cinema - or art in general - as an escapist pursuit. Although Allen had already explored this theme in earlier films - such as the Herbert Ross directed Play It Again, Sam (1972) and his own masterpiece Stardust Memories (1980); two films in which the author dealt more directly with his own relationship to cinema, as a writer and director - the work in question is really the first to take the subject of cinema - as an escape - and explore it through the perspective of a regular viewer.

As such, the story being told is best seen as a metaphor for the one-way relationship that exists between the audience and the work. A dramatisation of that feeling of seeing a film and falling in love with the spectacle of it, and the resulting sadness of being unable to take an active role in its development. Through its central character, Allen creates a loving ode to the world of movies, where the misery and the bitterness of the character's everyday life only reinforces how much greater a life spent within this world might be, as opposed to a life without it.

One-Hundred Favourite Films - Part Nine

Ongoing response to The Dancing Image "100 (of Your) Favourite Movies" meme-that's-not-a-meme, presented here in a loosely alphabetical order. I'm posting the series in reverse formation in an attempt to maintain the original continuity, from A to Z.

Ran
Directed by Akira Kurosawa - 1985

The title in Japanese invokes the dual spirits of chaos and rebellion, establishing this as a film about power; about the endless struggle for power, the need for it, and the inevitable corruption of those who seek it. It also establishes the prevailing theme of defiance. Defiance, not simply as a component of the plot, or as shorthand for Shakespeare's text, but as a statement of intent. An early indicator that the film, like many by Kurosawa, is one that defies convention.

Though the story, with its veiled allusions to King Lear and the rich historical context of its 16th century setting, is full of intrigue, brutality, magic and suspense, it is the pure, cinematic presentation of the film that leaves the greatest impression. The blur of colours, the space, the shrieking insanity of the performances and the noiseless battle sequences that underscore the seething, operatic soundtrack of Tôru Takemitsu, rend their way into the viewer's subconscious; defining the experience as something beyond simply telling a story, but creating, in the best spirit of Angelopoulos, something that resembles a work of living theatre. Theatre on a larger scale perhaps, but existing, in a physical sense; as if this play of moments and emotions had once occurred, like a conventional theatrical recording, on a stage of real locations.

In its continual back-and-forth between scenes of static observation, discussions of politics, strategic plans and personal intrigue, and the enormous scenes of warfare, destruction, violence and devastation, Kurosawa's film is never less than a true epic, but an epic that doesn't lose sight of the small details that define the greater whole. Like the hand of the Emperor brought down in a single movement to initiate the battle, the film is a sweeping gesture, but a gesture of great intelligence, integrity and emotion.

Rear Window
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock - 1954

The strength of Rear Window is the film's enduring correlation between the 'protagonist', as a receptacle - through which the dramatic events of the film unfold - and the role of the audience as spectators; a collective witness to the on-screen events, who enliven the drama and their link to this fictional character through their own subjective interpretations. In L.B. Jeffries - the wounded action-photographer 'inventing' a personal (Hitchcockian) thriller from the suspected safety of his own living room - the filmmakers create possibly the most stable template for the endlessly fascinating 'protagonist as audience/audience as protagonist' dichotomy; offering a central character who functions, much like the audience, as a viewer, intruding, literally, into the lives of these "characters" and the stories they tell.

The tension in the film comes from the identification of Jeffries as an extension of the audience; both parties confined to a single room, searching the rectangular window-space that breaks the fourth wall for the only real source of entertainment. As viewers, we're all guilty of this intrusion, this voyeurism; investing something of ourselves in the lives of others and perversely being rewarded with scenes of comedy, drama, titillation, intrigue and finally heart-stopping suspense.

N.B. I think this attempt to explain what I like most about the film was a bit of a failure. In the interest of keeping the series going, I've included it. It's the best I can do for now. In the future, I intend to come back to this entry and write something more definitive.

Red Angel
Directed by Yasuzo Masumura - 1966

As an anti-war statement, Red Angel is a film less about the "horrors of war" than a horror film that uses war as a backdrop to a more solemn philosophical concern. Though the exact nature of the concern is open to interpretation, I like to see it - first and foremost - as a film about the perseverance of the human spirit as something pure; something imperishable. Even amid the general atrocity of the setting, the filmmakers present their protagonist as someone strong enough to endure even the worst degradation; carrying the sorrow and the pity of these fallen young men and attempting to suffer on behalf of those too damaged or broken, regardless of the personal toll that such suffering might take.

In this respect, the character is not so much a protagonist in the conventional sense as a symbol. A nurse - referred to in the English translation of the title as an "angel" - who assumes the responsibility of human suffering; becoming a force of great comfort for those no longer strong enough to weather the indignity of war, or the physical and psychological transformations that the war can inflict. Through the perspective of this central character, the filmmakers are able to present war as something entirely brutal, horrifying and utterly demoralising, but without reducing it to the usual conflicts and divides that attempt to point the finger of guilt, or elicit sympathy and support for a specific (patriotic) cause.

In Red Angel, we feel not just the humiliation of war, but the sense that war is the ultimate humiliation, with Masumura denying us the spectacle and the heroism of a conflict full of action, excitement and bravery, and instead focusing on the cruel aftermath of lost limbs, pain and desperation. In doing so, the filmmakers are able to show the true cost of war, on a human level; not as something noble or necessary, but as a grotesque machine that moves across the landscape, destroying everything in its path.

Le révélateur
Directed by Philippe Garrel - 1968

In Le révélateur, the domestic drama becomes 'psychodrama', expressing through a series of allegorical gestures the sense of disappointment felt by the director as an immediate response to the perceived failure of the Paris riots of May 1968. In this sense, the film can be looked at as a silent scream, where the inability of these characters to express in words their anger, fear and frustration is conveyed, subjectively, by a deliberate lack of sound. Robbed of any kind of context that a soundtrack might provide, these silent images are left open to interpretation, but still seem to suggest an infernal parody of 'the modern family' - as a symbol - and their uncertain place within the turbulent culture of late 1960s' France.

The emphasis on the family is a convenient through-line for Garrel's more inscrutable ideologies, managing to evoke the political through the personal, while also creating an element of trepidation - if not outright peril - as we watch the family stumble through an extended nightmare into the brutality of the unknown. As the narrative-line develops, the parents become increasingly void-like; simply going through the motions of this bizarre situation, as the child - progressively more disconnected, emotionally and physically, from his parents - becomes a witness to their self-destruction.

By the end of the film, the child - a symbol for an ideal, or a way of thinking that must be protected against the unseen forces that pursue the family across a devastated landscape of scorched earth and roads leading nowhere - becomes the first sacrifice to this hedonistic folly; to the failure of that collective ideal. Pulled screaming from the arms of his parents - who attempt to claw him back from the forces working against them - it is difficult to see the child as anything less than a representation of the hopes and beliefs of the filmmakers' generation, forever out of reach.

Rope
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock - 1948

The construction of the film, like the titular cord of death, is a continuous strand, tight and unbroken. The beginning and end - isolated elements there to be "tied up" in the sense of narrative exposition - eventually become entwined at the precise moment of Stewart's third-act revelation, creating a noose that entraps these killers in a downfall of their own creation. Rope for me is the greatest illustration of Hitchcock's 'bomb under the table' theory, where the suggestion of intrigue or suspense is created by the knowing, rather than the not knowing; where the anticipation is much greater than the thrill simply because we know that something is about to happen. In this instance, it is an extended scene of social interaction taking place in a single location where the body of a young man, murdered by his friends in the opening sequence, is hidden, just out of view.

Hitchcock's perverse, darkly comic but never less than thrilling film is not just an excellent murder mystery, it is a film that actually engages with its central themes in a way that is both intelligent and genuinely thought-provoking. In its final minutes - in which the character played by James Stuart breaks out into his impassioned condemnation of the two protagonists - Hitchcock and his co-conspirators turn the finger of judgement against the audience for condoning this ruse, this crime, with their enjoyment of it; making any real sense of gratification that comes from the viewing of the film both bitter and acidic.

The Round-Up
Directed by Miklós Jancsó - 1966

The prison camp becomes a microcosm, both historically and politically. The approach presenting a world in miniature, where a re-enactment of a very real historical incident is used to create a veiled commentary on more recent cultural events. The political view, climaxing with the dark satire of the final scene, is pessimistic, but the liberation of the camera, as a force - able to intercede on behalf of these characters; expressing that which cannot 'freely' be expressed - finds poetry in scenes of confinement, persecution and betrayal.

The juxtaposition, between the brutality of the subject matter and the graceful way in which Jancsó records it, creates a moving contrast between the reality - with its violence, discrimination and corrupt political system - and the 'cinematic' - powerful enough to transform the expression into something beautiful, aesthetically, without losing the seriousness and the tragedy of the real event - is one of the most remarkable aspects of the film. Likewise, the visual contrast between the prison itself - closed-in and claustrophobic; there to trap and ensnare - and the surrounding landscape - a wide-open panorama of fields and marshes; where the line of the horizon becomes yet another on-screen representation of incarceration - depicts these characters as minute objects dwarfed by the complexities of a situation that is beyond their understanding and control.

Jancsó's film is an extraordinary experience, and genuinely: one of the most powerful films I've ever seen.

Sans soleil
Directed by Chris Marker - 1983

Sans soleil is an experience beyond easy categorisation or critique. It is a film that moves between narrative elements almost as freely as it moves between continents, cultures, ideas and events; finding, through its montage of images, a unique approach, able to suggest layers of interpretation, both emotional and analytical. As a general cinematic experience, there is a sensory aspect to this approach, in which a bricolage of elements - from documentary images to video-footage to photomontage to clips from Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) - are all cut together to create a story across time.

The montage approach, which at first seems scattered at will, is united by the narration, which creates, on one-level, a context for these moving-pictures, but on a separate level breaks-off, invents, projects and transforms this very real documentary-style travelogue of places into something approaching a vague science-fiction parable about the nature of recorded memory.

In pointing his camera at this world, Marker finds - within its collection of objects, faces, street scenes and relics of popular culture - an intricate network of stories, dramas, sketches and vignettes, unfolding, inter-connected, like a vast system of information. Like an anthropologist from a distant planet, Marker looks at the world with its histories, connections, emotions and meanings within meanings, all resting on the surface of the mundane, and creates from this restless observation a work that at almost thirty-years old, still feels like an audio-visual communiqué from not-so-distant future.

Sicilia!
Directed by Danièle Huillet & Jean-Marie Straub - 1999

A film that could have carried the subtitle "- A Return", illustrating that preoccupation with 'place'. The memory of a place, made distant by age, or exaggerated in the mind - as distant things often are - but still existing, as a reality, to be rediscovered by this character on his journey into the past. The sense of nostalgia is palpable from the very first frame. The silhouette of the man, a protagonist in the conventional sense, looks out across the water. The landscape in the distance is either a place that he's returning from or the place that he's returning to, but either way, there's the suggestion - even before the first interaction - that the journey is significant, if not emotionally overwhelming.

Sicilia! - which is less an adaptation of Elio Vittorini's novel 'Conversation in Sicily' than a public reading of it - is built around several "dialogues" on the subject of 'home' and the relationship that these characters have to the land of their fathers', which has fallen into despair. The journey of the protagonist across country culminates in a reunion between mother and son, where the discussion attempts to define the geographical history of the place through the personal history of these characters, as each confession, accusation and interrogation fills in the blanks left vague by the filmmakers' rigorous attention to the formalist elements of the text, and their framing of these locations via painterly, static tableaux.

The image of the countryside is turned into something almost mythical by the black & white cinematography, which on the one hand recalls the Italian 'neo-realist' films of the 1940s and 50s - with their natural cinematic beauty and the sense of post-war authenticity - but at the same time is an exaggeration of the reality, once again turning this land, as a reflection, into something that exists as a suspended recollection within the minds of these characters.

Solaris
Directed by Steven Soderbergh - 2002

As a point of reference, Soderbergh's hermetic adaptation of the 1961 science-fiction novel by Stanisław Lem is closer to the work of Alain Resnais than it is to Andrei Tarkovsky. While Tarkovsky's own 1972 adaptation used the basic concepts of Lem's text to explore the filmmaker's usual concerns, Soderbergh's approach is to jettison the metaphysical aspects in favour of a more intimate deconstruction of the book's central relationship and its prevailing forces of guilt and grief. If Tarkovsky's film was "sculpting in time", Soderbergh's is sculpting in memory.

The film - which plays like an intense encounter between two people trapped in the cycle of a relationship doomed to repeat itself, endlessly, like an echo through the depths of space - brings to mind the haunted expressions of films like Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) or Muriel (1963), where its fragments of narrative, and the sense of time and space as something oppressive or tyrannical, turn the experience into a breathless reunion between the wounded and the dead. This feeling of a memory made real, turned frightful by the bitterness and isolation of these characters lost in space, is further suggested by Soderbergh's cold, formalist approach; where the framing of actors as immaterial objects against a labyrinth of buildings or planetary structures, or the play of lights, which evoke the inner emotions of characters unable to express, finds the filmmaker working at the absolute peak of his abilities; not just as director, but as writer, editor and cinematographer.

This continual focus - as voices drift over static, often blurred images of empty spaces, which emphasise the sense of loss and dislocation - creates something almost hypnotic, if not genuinely suffocating. The entire film, which moves to the ambient rhythms of its Cliff Martinez soundtrack, becomes, in the light of its characters' final sacrifice, a blue note of despair.

Still Life
Directed by Jia Zhangke - 2006

The film's opening sequence establishes a tone and an atmosphere that will develop throughout; a scene of quiet reflection on the Yangtze River, introducing us to the pensive coalminer Han Sanming on a boat bound for the Three Gorges region of the rapidly dissipating town of Fengjie. Here we begin the exploration of director Jia Zhangke's quietly compelling Still Life. An extraordinary work of enormous atmosphere and great natural beauty, about characters disconnected; in search of the past in a town in which the past is literally being levelled to make way for the future, and where the people we meet on life's lonesome journey fail to alleviate our struggle, acting only as markers; like the inanimate objects that we leave in our wake that remind people that we were here, that we existed.

Through this entrancing scenario, Zhangke is able to comment on the fleeting nature of time and existence; of the co-existence of two completely different characters arriving in this location at the same time and for similar reasons, though never once interacting. The symbol of the town and how these characters adapt to it also allows the filmmaker to form a more pointed commentary on the politics of contemporary China; in particular the sense of corruption and resulting violence that has been allowed to escalate and eventually destroy these grand historical settlements that have been inhabited, visited and documented in countless works of art and literature for many centuries past.

In this sense, it is a film of ever shifting perspectives; not simply in the emphasis on two separate characters, but in the specific way in which Zhangke is able to move so seamlessly between the poetic and the political, the abstract and the natural. In this regard, film feels like a kind of restless combination of Andrei Tarkovsky's great masterpiece Nostalghia (1983) - in which a homesick Russian poet explores an ancient Italian village that holds the secrets to a haunted past - and Michelangelo Antonioni's unsung documentary film China (1972), which recalls the notion of a film crew entering forgotten pockets of reality and creating a contemporary portrait of the world as it is (as it existed) at that point particular in time.

One-Hundred Favourite Films - Part Ten

Ongoing response to The Dancing Image "100 (of Your) Favourite Movies" meme-that's-not-a-meme, presented here in a loosely alphabetical order. I'm posting the series in reverse formation in an attempt to maintain the original continuity, from A to Z.

Stop Making Sense
Directed by Jonathan Demme - 1984

Let's drop the 'concert' tag from the term 'concert film' and appreciate this for what it is. Demme's film - a live recording of a Talking Heads performance; shot over three nights at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, 1983 - is one of the greatest American motion-pictures of the 1980s, 'concert' or otherwise! A film that goes beyond merely showing the band play live for the benefit of a paying audience and instead manages to explore the very idea of performance, and our perception of what music is. Music, not as a commodity, or as showbiz 'event', but as an expression; as a communal experience.

By stripping away the usual extraneous baggage, like pyrotechnics, enormous sets and dazzling costumes that are so often associated with films of this nature, Demme & Co. are able to place the music - and this shared experience of it - at the very centre of the thing; creating something that has the feeling of a great spectacle - like a grand revival or a back-lot musical number - but a spectacle of small gestures; with vulnerability, celebrations and moments of great intimacy.

The approach, which begins with lead singer David Byrne walking out onto the empty stage with his acoustic guitar and a now defunct cassette player, only to be joined, one by one, by the rest of the band and supporting musicians as the set-list develops, gives the film its sense of narrative. A feeling of story - full of drama and emotion and individual characters - that unfolds, like interconnected vignettes, through each of the sixteen songs.

The Suspended Step of the Stork
Directed by Theodoros Angelopoulos - 1991

Anyone who has seen this typically mesmeric Angelopoulos meditation on 'borders' (political, geographical, generational, psychological) speaks of the pure spectacle of the wedding across the river, which in perfect cinematic terms suggests the absurdity of nationalism - of claiming place - as an affront to the natural human instinct to create links between people. It is, in its presentation, one of the boldest of Angelopoulos's great set-pieces, and one of the defining moments of this, his greatest film.

Using a framing device similar to the one found in his earlier film Voyage to Cythera (1984), Angelopoulos sends a filmmaker - in this instance a producer of "human interest" documentaries for television - into a refugee camp somewhere along the Greek border. Increasingly fascinated by the image of a dishevelled man of low standing but great dignity, the filmmaker - as vessel for Angelopoulos - begins to 'invent' a story around him. The story of a noted politician, who having become disillusioned with the system, simply disappeared.

The character of the filmmaker, in many ways a surrogate for Angelopoulos - the restless observer who enters this place in order to find a story - is also a representation of the audience. His presence suggesting the role of the viewer as an intruder within the lives of these characters, and how this intrusion relates to possibly the greatest "border" an audience will ever face: the one that exists between reality and fiction.

The Tango Lesson
Directed by Sally Potter - 1997

This is a film about dance - about the Argentine Tango to be precise - but it's also a film about cinema as a creative force. Cinema, as a spectacle, is a kind of dance; an expression of movement and emotion. The bodies within the frame play out this intricate choreography, which suggests, in its motions, stances, attitudes and positions, a variety of stories (of love and anger, sorrow and betrayal); but the dancers are matched at every step by the chorography of the camera, the intonations of the editing and the rhythms of the music. When placed together in collaboration these elements create a story; the story of a man and a woman.

Potter's intensely personal, near-autobiographical film, uses the liberation of dance as a way of dealing with the often cumbersome process of making a film (from the meddlesome producers, to the weight of expectation, to writer's block and sheer vulnerability...). However, in doing so, she's able to illustrate the natural ability of filmmaking, when it works, to transcend these various pitfalls and create something that is, as a creative act, as passionate, moving and wordlessly-expressive as the dance itself.

Three Crowns of the Sailor
Directed by Raúl Ruiz - 1983

How to express in words the magic of this film, or any Ruiz film for that matter? Its narrative, like a tall tale dusted off and handed down by the narrator to its curious listener, is full of strange tangents, jarring twists and a variety of intangible loose ends. There are stories within stories - a kaleidoscope of images, refracted, like a cracked mirror-ball manifestation - which traipse backwards and forwards between mystery, fantasy, thriller, melodrama and farce, as if the whole thing is being invented for our amusement (before the rug is pulled out from under us by yet another narrative left-turn!)

The combination of dazzling (formalist) experimentation, nested flashbacks, outrageous compositions (which boggle the mind as well as the eye) and a continual inter-cutting between black & white and saturated colour creates the feeling of an unreliable narrator patching together a tapestry of elaborate fabrication, and goes further than any other film (that I can think of) in capturing the atmosphere and tonality of the great short stories of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who seems to have been an influence.

Tokyo Story
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu - 1953

It seems impossible to define the extraordinary power of this film, which on paper reads as a typically unassuming post-war melodrama about the usual concerns: family, responsibility, bereavement, and the ever widening gap that exists between the generations. Ozu had already covered much of the same territory in earlier films, most notably The Only Son (1936) and Late Spring (1947), but rather than feel like a reiteration of such themes, there's a certain process of refinement in the approach to Tokyo Story, which once again explores the same concerns, but does so with such assurance and simplicity that the continual shifts, from comedy to drama, jollity to pathos, seem effortlessly placed.

If the experience can be reduced to anything at all, it's the feeling of authenticity. An emotional authenticity, with these moments and interactions displaying a rich understanding of human behaviour - a warmth and compassion that makes the occasional critique seem all the more pointed, or keenly observed - and an overwhelming sense of time and place, of life, continually moving, crashing, then caressing, like waves against the rocks. Most films provide entertainment; some even inspire great thoughts and feeling; it's a select few that are powerful enough to teach us how to live.

Tropical Malady
Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul - 2004

Moments that stir the soul: The gold noon sun of the opening sequence; the body and the music; the camera brushing through the tall green grass as if presenting the perspective of another; the shape shifter that intrudes upon the scene and watches, silently, from the periphery; the figure that wanders naked into the empty frame; the song and the cinema; the moped ride that brings to mind the vacant drifting into night of Catherine Deneuve's 'Marie' in Pola X (1999); the underground shrine; the stories within stories; the questions of love, with its mysteries and conspiracies; the spirit of the animal returning to the forest; the lights in the trees; the eyes of the beast burning brightly through the dark.

These waning moments that bewitch us like that "strange creature" on the spirit's path, who beguiles us with its otherworldly presence; plays games with us, forces us to pursue it through the darkened forest until we're lost, like the trapper in the clearing, where the branches hang down like the talons of an out-stretched claw.

That Tropical Malady is defined by these moments is in no way a criticism. Its bare plot, which spins two seemingly separate stories with much room for individual interpretation, feels at times like a blank canvas. We project ourselves onto it by bringing our own interests and emotional perspectives; seeing a creation of love or revulsion, devotion or obsession, depending on our own individual personalities. As a result, the film remains vague, elusive even; challenging the audience to think themselves through the film, to ponder its great mysteries and construct the plot in hindsight from the similarities that are formed by both parts of the narrative.

The Village
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan - 2004

Like Miklós Jancsó's The Round-Up (1966), a recognisable 'historical' setting is used to explore a series of contemporary concerns. 'The village' of the title becomes a metaphor for America in the shadow of 9/11; fearful and hermetic; fuelled by scaremongering and propaganda tactics that impose order, conformity and control. The 'monsters' that breach the periphery of this prison-as-village manifestation are representations of a society so blinded by pious self-righteousness that they fail to recognise violence and resentment as inherently human traits. In doing so, these characters effectively initiate their own downfall, but refuse to acknowledge it as anything less than a personal utopia.

Regardless of how well we perceive this social commentary, Shyamalan's film is undeniably beautiful; every frame, evocatively lit and composed with an artist's eye, could be mistaken for an impressionist painting. The play of light and colour is incredible, but it's the depth of the film that most impresses, with Shyamalan producing an atmospheric "monster movie" that not only works as a wider commentary on society, isolation, violence and bereavement, but remains perhaps the most successfully realised treatise on the director's favourite theme: the sacrifice.

For all its slow, unsettling ambience, its high-concept approach and its typically controversial mystery-box reveal, The Village is really, at its best, a wounded cry of anguish, a declaration of love and a solemn, beautifully crafted and incredibly moving film about the perseverance of the human spirit, as personified by Ivy Walker; the blind leading the blind.

The Ward
Directed by John Carpenter - 2010

'The ward', as a setting, as a physical space, is a representation of the character's psyche. Its winding corridors, like the corridors of the mind, become a labyrinth, leading everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The evil that lurks within this maze of emotions - the literal 'monster in the box' that stalks and picks-off, one by one, these vulnerable young women - represents a great trauma; but the same can be said of the characters as well. Where The Ward succeeds is in creating this dichotomy between what is felt by the central character and what is presented on-screen; where the uncontrollable bursts of emotion (cf. Run Baby Run) are not only a respite from the solitude of confinement, physical and psychological, but an outward expression of the character's inner thoughts and fears.

Here, persecution and self-loathing find an outlet through a generic supernatural mystery and its knife-through-the-heart twist.

Werckmeister Harmonies
Directed by Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky - 2000

From its opening dramatisation of planets in orbit (creating a living enactment of a solar eclipse) to the eventual exhausted feeling of numbed dislocation - which characterises the overall experience - the effect of the film on me, as a viewer, was comparable to the effect that the giant whale carcass has on its own protagonist, János Valuska. As a result, I've come to see the film as a similar 'mysterious object'; one powerful enough to transform the very character of an audience willing to look at the film - to be moved and enthralled by its atmosphere, imagery and remarkable intensity - without necessarily subjecting it to any great scrutiny; just let the film speak.

As such, I find it impossible to define, clearly at least, just how captivating the film is, how breathlessly its story develops through each vivid tableau, and how much the use of the camera - blocking and revealing objects like the orbiting planets of the opening scene - creates a feeling of dizzying insanity, as tangible for the audience as the plague of madness that descends upon its characters. This is something that cannot be explained, only experienced.

Winstanley
Directed by Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo - 1975

The film's authenticity is overwhelming. The sense of time and place, visible in every costume and location, in the rust, the mud and decay, or on the faces of these non-professional actors who speak the words with an untrained innocence that makes us believe every second of their interactions, their politics and ideals, is alive in every frame. There are no 'stars' here, just faces. Honest faces, plain faces, ugly faces; faced caked in dirt and debris but still looking at the shadows on the hillside, at the ploughed fields and the sense of accomplishment, with a wet-eyed optimism that is touching in its integrity.

Some familiarity with the actual historical context might be necessary to really understand the relationships between characters, or the greater political shifts that occur across the edges of the film, but really this is Brownlow's attempt at a John Ford western - think Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) perhaps - by way of the rigorous , precise, historical documentary-dramas of Peter Watkins or Straub-Huillet.

Recent Work

Small catalogue of images from recent film-related work. Since last Augst, I've been making a conscious effort to reinvent my approach to filmmaking. If a lack of funds or a lack of support amongst friends and family means that I'm unable to make a film like Le lit de la vierge (1969) or Le pont du Nord (1981), I can at least explore the same themes through a different methodology. This reinvention owes a lot to the influence of filmmakers like Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Patrick Keiller, Derek Jarman and early Peter Greenaway, but it's also a continuation of what I've been trying to do with the blog: i.e. using a particular film as a frame for exploring more personal ideas under the belief that criticism, for me at least, should be a combination of essay, autobiography and genuine fiction. The same is also true for filmmaking.

At this point I'm not at all confident enough to post the actual films online. Some of the more recent projects could still be improved with tighter editing, a new soundtrack mix, etc, but I suppose I wanted to include some acknowledgement of their existence, if only to remind myself that the blog is still mine, and not in the possession of some other, disconnected part of my psyche that exists somewhere outside of the boundaries of my everyday life [although it does, no question]. Nonetheless, it's the first great step towards actually sharing my work with an audience, and not just making it for myself.

Communication: DV, Colour / 14 minutes and 27 seconds / 20/02/2012:


Self Portraits: DV, Colour / 8 minutes and 24 seconds / 30/01/2012:


Garden Scene: DV, Black & White / 28 minutes and 15 seconds / 02/01/2012:


A Reading of Virginia Woolf's 1931 Novel The Waves [extract]: DV, Colour / 40 minutes and 22 seconds / 26/12/2011:


Absence: DV, Colour / 10 minutes and 16 seconds / 15/11/2011:


Sperm Impregnates the Egg / A Baby is Born: DV, Colour / 4 minutes and 32 seconds / 23/10/2011:


The Illicit Carpet Bombings of Eastern Cambodia and Laos, March 18 1969 to May 28 1970: DV, Colour / 6 minutes and 22 seconds / 15/10/2011:


The Dying Light: DV, Colour / 8 minutes and 15 seconds / 06/10/2011:


Sunrise [An Impression]: DV, Colour / 53 minutes and 10 seconds / 28/09/2011:


Prison of Rain: DV, Black & White / 12 minutes and 53 seconds / 10/09/2011:


The Quest for Fire: DV, Colour / 7 minutes and 28 seconds / 06/08/2011:

All images © Amarcord Films/Lights in the Dusk, 2011-2012

Chungking Express

A film about time and coincidence.

In this sense, a continuation of themes already established in Wong Kar-wai's second feature-length film, the sweltering melodrama Days of Being Wild (1990), and a springboard to the deeper meditations on memory and place that occur in the masterworks Ashes of Time (1994), Happy Together (1997), In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2004). These are films that slip between layers of memory and actuality; between how it is and how it could have been, either as a projection of the character's wants or needs, or through the accidental nature of existence; the significance of chance encounters, misheard declarations of love, or unlikely coincidences that occur when characters stumble across one another at a particular point in time.

In Wong's films, the situation that is established as a facilitator for these wider considerations is simple, if not wholly mundane. Two characters meet: either they live across the hall, or they work in the same part of town, or they share the same thoughts and feelings that compel them towards inevitable junctures and conclusions. These are characters on a collision course: fated, marked; existing on the fringes of a society, not because they're incapable of living any other way, but because the requirements of a lifestyle - the job or the social situation - dictates it. The loneliness, the desperation, the tedium of places all inspire a particular attitude that leads these characters into these situations in the first place; these locations that we return to again and again, always in some new manifestation of the same old routine, regardless of time, place or generation.

The small take-away restaurants, bodegas and bars give good cover for those meetings between inarticulate strangers with nothing much to say but a need to share a moment (or two) with someone other than themselves. Let the music drown it out before the soul starts screaming; take a walk through the lonely backstreets where characters can saunter, alone with their dreams and their shadow as chaperone.

Chungking Express directed by Wong Kar-wai, 1994:

In Chungking Express (1994), the two characters - inner-city cops battered and bruised by an aching loneliness - wander a labyrinth of these backstreets, alleyways and market places, converging in bars or convenience stores, but never really speaking; just taking the opportunity to soak in the spectacle of a life that eludes them, before it's back to the lonesome apartment buildings or the late night city streets. Both characters spend the duration of each segment sifting through old memories; living like revenants in a world that can't recognise their emptiness. Their paths cross on two separate occasions, but never intersect. Instead, their two stories are presented separately, one after the other, with each story offering echoes and variations of a theme that ripples throughout, uniting them through grief.

At the end of the film, after both threads of the narrative have reached their inevitable conclusions, the essential themes, of time, coincidence and displacement, come full circle, with the allusion to California - replayed by a character sitting in a bar called "the California", and with the song California Dreamin' on the soundtrack - highlighting the central idea of two entities existing at the same time in different places, connected, but at the same time, apart.

Black Ice

The title seems appropriate. The experience of the film suggesting the slow slippery slide of an unseen hazard as it catches the light of a clear December morning, just seconds before our feet slip out from under us, or the car drifts into the break. This light, burning bright beneath the surface of the screen, throws shapes into our periphery. Shapes that might exist as mere markings on the celluloid - like a living collage of daubed paint, dead leaves or spilled ink - but which, on closer reflection, can be interpreted by the viewer on an emotional or psychological level. Not so much as a Rorschach Test as an attempt to find meaning in the abstract. Like the refracted glare of the sunlight flaring off the camera lens on a holiday snapshot, or the dappled spots of rain on a windowpane that turns the world outside into a shimmering mosaic, this, as an effect, is something powerful enough to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.

Like in Mothlight (1963), or The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), the presentation of the film, when looked at, straight-on, as a moving canvas, creates an interpretation that is further established in the mind by the connotations of the title. Here, it's that slow forward-journey through the void that makes Black Ice (1994), as a motion-picture, more immersive, more captivating, than any 3D blockbuster. The illusion of depth, of movement, created, not by multi-million dollar "FX", but by an optical illusion. Something that is formed within the mind; the act of viewing transforming it into whatever we want it to be, but at the same time, exactly what the filmmaker intended.

Black Ice by Stan Brakhage, 1994:

When I was a child, I'd play this game where I'd press the palms of my hands hard into my eye sockets and hold them there for several minutes. After a short while, the impression of the force would form against the retina and create the illusion of movement. A trip into the unknown, like Avatar (2009), but less expensive. At first the experience was like a slow descent into the depths of a jungle canopy. The tops of trees, enormous - green, blue and purple - covering the forest floor (which seemed endless), would blur and blend all around me. I'd dare myself to keep my hands pressed as hard against the eye for as long as I was able; to stay on this path, this trek, down into the abyss that my imagination was creating, to see what else I might discover. Eventually the whole thing would merge into a collage of colours, all melting and dissolving into a series of amorphous great blobs, like the shapes in a lava lamp, or a B-movie assimilation of the 'stargate' sequence from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

I was sure that this activity was damaging my eyes but it was worth it to experience all that the mind could conjure. Like interpreting abstract art, it was something that I could claim as my own. It wasn't defined or restricted by what others suggested, but open to my imagination. The same is true of Brakhage's films, which are there to be looked at, intently, closely or from a distance, at the changing shapes that create images, ideas, emotions, stories and room for contemplation. Watching a film like Black Ice in the dark of this room on a small laptop, the light of the screen like a beacon, is a profound experience, though I can only begin to imagine how extraordinary it would be to see it as intended, as a theatrical projection. The entire cinema becoming the portal for some fantastic journey, like Jules Verne, sans contraption.