Blurbs, part 3: the end.

Well, that's it. I have finished my studies in Oxford, and with that, an important chapter in my life. As to what comes after, time will tell. Hopefully I will have more time now to post a bit more often than I have in the past year. But in the meantime, the blurbs I wrote for Magdalen Film Society in my final term:

Gremlins.

The classic anti-Christmas horror comedy, still as bitingly satirical as ever.

“Now I have another reason to hate Christmas.”

Joe Dante might very well qualify as one of the most talented American directors currently working, but his consistently intelligent, sharply satirical, and hilariously funny output might paradoxically be enabled by the marginal position he occupies within the film industry, having fun digs at all of its conventions while providing hugely entertaining films. Gremlins, his most famous film and one of the greatest spoofs of the Christmas spirit ever made, displays the characteristic combination of human warmth and savage critique that makes him one of the greatest satirists working in Hollywood today.

The story follows a young man who receives a cute creature for Christmas but breaks the three rules of raising it, only to let loose a bunch of monsters who wreak havoc on his small town. This is little more than an excuse for wrecking all the traditional institutions of small-town America, gleefully bringing to the surface all the neuroses and hidden tensions between the memorable cast of secondary characters. Yet it is central to Dante's vision that there is rarely such a thing as a villain in his films: some of the most sympathetic characters are the gremlins themselves, and Dante clearly has more fun observing their hedonist debauchery than the moral uptightness of some of the human characters. A sharp anti-Christmas comment that reconfigures traditional feel-good movies as horror, and a gleefully liberating destruction fest that rejoices in tearing down the American cultural unconscious, Gremlins still stands as one of the best popcorn films of all time.

A Man Escapes.

A patient examination of the efforts called for by freedom, in one of the greatest films ever made.

“To fight – fight against the walls, against myself, my door.”

Jean-Luc Godard once said of Robert Bresson that he is “French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.” No small praise, coming from the man who is French cinema as Tolstoy is the Russian novel and Bach is German music. One of the greatest films ever made, Bresson's A Man Escapes is also the best introduction to his work, which stands as one of the most original and daring that cinema has produced.

Drawing on Bresson's own wartime experiences, as well as on the true story of Resistance fighter André Devigny, the film follows a man called Fontaine's escape attempt from the Nazi gaols of Lyon. The first shot of the film, showing the man's hands, sets the tone: the excitement and suspense of the film reside in its patient, unflinching observations of the very concrete problems that stand in Fontaine's way, and of the perseverance required he displays. Freedom is the central concern of the film, and Bresson complements his sparse, crisp imagery with a soundtrack that consistently plays on the dialectic of freedom and captivity: the slightest noises indicate menaces or opportunities, comradeship or oppression, and constantly expand the realm of possibilities by reminding us of a world outside the prison cell. With its very concrete sense of resistance, A Man Escapes is one of the few truly existentialist films: a work of art that exhibits a true sense not only of the difficulty, but also of the uncompromising necessity of freedom.

Two-Lane Blacktop:

The cult road-movie, which stands at the peak of 1970s American cinema.

“You can never go fast enough.”

Like many great artists, Monte Hellman might have had great trouble getting his projects off the ground, yet one need only watch the film for which he is most famous to verify that he is one of the most essential American film-makers of the past forty years. For all those who consider that the 1970s were a golden age of American cinema, Two-Lane Blacktop, both the greatest road-movie ever and the absolute anti-road-movie, is one of its most enduring miracles.

The film follows a set of four unnamed characters, as their shifting interactions and rivalries bring into question their entire way of life. Theoretically, the story is the classic set-up of a race between two drivers, one a smooth talker constantly building up his own mythology, the other one quiet and ruthlessly focused on racing. Yet Hellman continually undermines the notion of rugged virility and masculine affirmation which usually form the genre: conflicts are observed in a coolly detached way, and characters stop in squalid diners as often as they cross lush landscapes. By the infamous ending (one of the most memorable in American cinema), the two conflicting visions of masculinity (and of the actor's craft) have exposed as equally false, empty codes whereby men prove themselves to each other but become incapable of genuine contact, so that the very idea of “winning the girl” becomes a dead end. Two-Lane Blacktop takes the road movie ever faster towards its culimation in absolute stillness. Run, run, as fast as you can...

Children in the Wind.

An masterwork of unassuming spontaneity by one of the great forgotten masters of Japanese cinema.

“You only have freedom when you're young.”

The films of Hiroshi Shimizu, one of the supreme (and unjustly neglected) masters of Japanese cinema, offer a blast of fresh air to anyone seeking worthwhile portrayals of childhood on film. Whereas most attempts either portray children as annoying idiots or as cloying creatures so irritatingly cute as to be devoid of any reality, Shimizu pays close attention to their interactions and aspirations, letting them exist as multi-faceted beings as worthy of interest as the adults around them. Nowhere is the generosity of his vision as evident as in one of his best films, Children in the Wind.

Sanpei and Zenta are two brothers who see their position in the group of village children undermined when their father meets with trouble at work. Shimizu attentively follows the reverberations of this, first in the family, then in the wider frame of society, carefully drawing parallels between the economic struggles of the adult world and the discord it creates within the children's society. A master at integrating human figures in landscapes, Shimizu effortlessly creates compositions all the more stunning for their simplicity, and has few challengers in the art of contriving scenes that are both funny and intensely moving. His children are intelligent and funny, eager to discover the world, and Shimizu adopts their posture of patient and ever-renewed exploration to chart the transformations of the slowly modernizing Japanese rural community. Beautifully simple and effortlessly rich, the communal vision of Children in the Wind is one of the most compelling portrayals of children ever seen on screen.

Murder

"This is also why economists get away with murder: it’s so boring that no one is watching them."

Adam Curtis.

Film Society Blurbs, 2/3.

Dear readers who are still out there: I do intend to go on writing for this blog, but for a variety of reasons (exams, very active film society involvement, enhanced social life, and mostly non-film related reading in the past year or so) I haven't really been able to do so for the past few months.

In the meantime, here are the blurbs that I wrote for Magdalen Film Society last term. I will post those for the last term once the films have actually been shown, and then I do intend to post at least a few thoughts on film programming as an activity, as I had promised I would. Anyway, without further ado:


An Affair to Remember

For anyone who still thinks that the 1950s were a shallow decade of conformism for Hollywood, An Affair to Remember, a film of almost unsurpassed romanticism, is also a supreme example of radical genre-mixing. As such, it manages the feat of being both one of the greatest romantic comedies ever, and one of the greatest melodramas ever.

What makes it so simultaneously heart-warming and heart-wrenching is the complete mastery with which Leo McCarey, still a criminally under-rated director, treats this tale of a man and a woman, soon to be married to others, who fall in love and promise to break off their respective engagements and meet again in six months at the top of the Empire State Building. A remake of his own Love Affair, it is a study in what brings two people together or keeps them apart. McCarey uses cinema-scope with a rare, self-effacing brilliance, modulating the spaces that his characters share and taking the time to watch them move from guarded flirting to deep attraction. Resting on the finely tuned interaction between a womanizing Cary Grant whose games of seduction give way to genuine commitment, and a quietly strong Deborah Kerr who refuses happiness on terms other than her own, the film finds its soul in the slow process of falling in love. When the two finally accept their attraction, in a scene whose gentleness is the true heart of the film, the result is an unassuming sincerity without parallel in the history of cinema.

An American in Paris

While the musical is not as fashionable today as film noir among film buffs, it is a genre that helped define Hollywood and has given it as many masterworks as any other genre. An American in Paris, one of the pinnacles of Gene Kelly and director Vincente Minnelli's careers, is also one of the miracles of the genre, defined by the constant tension between the director and the star's personalities.

The film, one of the better versions of Europe as a fantasy of America that have always populated Hollywood, follows the tribulations of Jerry, the eponymous painter who lives in Paris for inspiration, when he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be engaged to one of his friends. From the very beginning, which sees Jerry waking up in his one-room appartment in an elaborate choreography which sees every-day movements (getting out of bed, preparing a cup of coffee) casually infused with a rhythm and musicality that sets the whole world in motion, it is clear that the film's mood is wildly infectious. But what makes it truly distinctive is the final ballet, where Minnelli's bitter-sweet vision of love finds its true expression. As Jerry imagines himself, to Gershwin's score, running through a stylized Paris straight out of the great paintings he loves, the film creates Hollywood's answer to The Red Shoes, an explosion of color and music that radically reconfigures the film and bears up to the comparison with Michael Powell's masterwork. There is no higher praise.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

One of the cult slasher hits of the eighties, A Nightmare on Elm Street belongs squarely to that golden generation of films which, with Halloween as the example, claimed the tradition of Psycho as its own and brought it where it has stayed ever since : in the realm of the pulp, trashy, and endlessly inventive shocker.

The film, which features Johnny Depp in one of his first performances, uses all the well-worn tricks of the trade : it-was-all-a-dream sequence, teen-agers getting killed after sex, references to The Exorcist and The Shining, fear of female sexuality, embodied in the iconic image of the claws coming out from between the bathing heroine's legs...Yet it is clear that Wes Craven, with his absurdist sense of humor, had already understood most of what cinema has been telling us since. With the determination of those with no money but a story to tell, he walks the audience through the teenage version of the american dream and transforms all of its images, from the high school hall to the suburban home, into haunting visions of horror. Twenty-five years before Inception, the film invents the lethal dream, tells us that our world is a nightmare, that nightmares are real, and that we get lost in between. And thus, in the most unlikely way, one of the great pulp masterworks of B horror film-making joins paths with W.B.Yeats: in dreams begins responsibility.

Of time and discovery

Tarkovsky's films are, as everybody knows, about time. What time? The time it takes to wait, to take something in, to wait for something to appear because there is no telling when it might. Better yet: the time it takes for the character and the viewer to understand that what they are waiting for has changed between the beginning of a shot and the end. The time it takes to move from a character (i.e. a variable) to a landscape (i.e. a thought), to let the viewer take in the landscape (whether a meadow or a cathedral), and to move back to the character taking in the landscape as a new element in his (rarely her) problem. Which is why his camera movements are rarely about mapping out a space, and often about revealing a character's discovery of a space. And the difference between revealing (the work of the camera) and discovering (the work of the character) is the difference between looking at a character and looking with a character. In Tarkovsky's films, the camera is in almost complete control, and its work is to seize the instant of discovery, of understanding, of appearance. A camera slowly overtakes a character, pushing him out the right side of the frame, only to let him reappear on the left side of the frame at the end of the camera movement. What has changed? The character has now seen. Seen what? That is the question at the centre of every single one of Tarkovsky's films.

Programming notes

This year is my final year at university, leaving me with little time to do anything but study (theoretically: the lure of film-watching is often hard to resist). However, one thing I have thankfully found time for is film programming at our local film society. Having been mostly learning the ropes in my first term, I haven't exactly had time to really think through what programming means, and in which new ways it forces one to think about films. Is any film programmed an endorsement? Are we saying we think it is a good film, or only that it is one worth watching for reasons that might not be related to quality per se? How does one pair films? For that last question, one of my ideals has been Brad Stevens's comments on his ideal double bill of Inland Empire+Céline et Julie vont en bateau, but how possible is that kind of fusion in practice on a regular basis?

Anyway, these are thoughts I need to sort out for myself. I do intend to do that, as I raelly do think that however small the scale I'm doing it on, I really should be using my programming to question and enrich some of my critical positions and a prioris.
In the meantime, however, and since I've written shamefully little in the past few months on this blog, here are the blurbs I wrote for films which were shown and I supported (I have tried not to let marketing interfere too much with criticism, but a certain measure of hyping has been inevitable):



The Bad Sleep Well (Akira Kurosawa, 1960)

Kurosawa remains famous, especially outside Japan, for his historical epics; yet his contemporary works are often equally stunning, and one of the best windows into the transormations Japan went through following World War Two. With The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa delivers both one of the greatest post-noirs ever and one of the most atypical.

Taking its subject matter from one of the countless corruption scandals that has mired Japanese political life since 1945, The Bad Sleep Well follows a real estate bribery case as it unravels from within. It opens with a breath-taking twenty-minute wedding ceremony that presents social systems as contractual arrangements with no place for individuality, an extraordinary feat of mise-en-scène that uses splendid Scope framings to illustrate power relations between all the main characters while giving us only the barest hints as to where the actual narrative will go. Incorporating elements of noir (high-contrast black and white, a view of society as fundamentally corrupt) and modernism (as in l'Avventura and Psycho, it takes a while to understand who the main characters will be), the film even anticipates many of the conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s (The Conversation, The Parallax View) in its presentation of impersonal power relations where corruption is not a moral conundrum but a system. In the implacability of its progression as in the total mastery of its directing, it stands as one of the most under-rated monuments of its author and the genre he was working in.

Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, 1980)

Without a doubt the most (in)famous of the many Italian exploitation films of the 1970s, Cannibal Holocaust is also one of the best. Mixing the usual violent and erotic elements required to put bums on seats with an equally important but less acknowledged political focus, it is a ferocious satire of the media, and a forerunner of many trends in horror cinema, from Blair Witch Project to Cloverfield.

From the opening, where a reporter's speech about places on Earth that still live as if in the stone age, with survival of the fittest as the only rule, plays over images of downtown Manhattan, it becomes clear that the film has more on its agenda than just shocks. It is split in two parts, the first of which sees an anthropologist going into the Amazon jungle to look for four documentary film-makers who vanished without a trace after attempting to film a tribe of cannibals deep inside the “Green Inferno”. This sequence sets up all the archetypes of the exploitation film (civilized whites going into the jungle and encountering evil savages), archetypes the film will spend the remaining half deconstructing. As the anthropologist discovers the team's footage, it becomes clear that any image of savagery the film might have offered possesses its mirror in the horrors the young American film-makers committed. Both deconstruction of media reporting, arresting blood-and-guts spectacle, and comment on Western colonialism more generally, Cannibal Holocaust remains a milestone of exploitation cinema.

Mother and Son (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1997)

It says something about our awareness of world cinema that two of Sokurov's greatest films, Days of Eclipse and The Second Circle, are unavailable in this country. Mother and Son, however, is. A major achievement by anyone's standards, it is one of the most original films of the 90s.

Annointed by Tarkovsky as his heir, Sokurov shares many characteristics with the master: a measured sense of time pushed almost to the point of stasis, a deep mysticism that finds expression in languid shots of nature, and an almost mythological view of the Russian people. Mother and Son, which brings these traits to their aesthetic culmination, details the last few days that a son spends with his mother before she dies. The two enjoy each other's company, delve into the past, and take walks in the fields to admire nature one last time. Sokurov's use of distorting lenses transforms his characters into icons, and the painterly visions of nature he gives us here are among the most gorgeous landscape shots ever committed to film. The moments of contemplation add up to reveal an undercurrent of muted grief, and as the film unfolds, its' silent epiphanies gain a cumulative impact unlike anything else in current cinema. A quietly devastating masterpiece.

Scribblings on A Wife Confesses

-Jonathan Rosenbaum has repeatedly linked Masumura to Ray, Fuller, Aldrich and Tashlin, but after seeing this film, it is impossible not to be reminded that he initially worked as Antonioni's assistant. The treatment of love as a momentary reprieve against pervasive alienation (of which loneliness and imposed interdependence are only two different forms), the impossibility of it lasting due to moral requirements which are only social requirements in disguise... Without necessarily aiming for it, Masumura has made one of the few films that does not require a point of view. He posits subjectivity as never quite within reach but always slightly beside the point. What matters is not full understanding of, or identification with, any one person's emotions, but what goes on between two clashing subjectivities. He does this using a method of which the Japanese are the masters: the human face is always on the verge of vanishing, at the very limit of being discernable.






-Again, Jonathan Rosenbaum: " It’s a courtroom thriller about a young widow who’s being tried for her part in the death of her abusive older husband while they were mountain climbing, and it hinges on the haunting question of what she was thinking when she made the split-second decision to cut the rope connecting the two of them."
And again, I think he's only partly right. For he loses sight of the many, many ways in which Masumura is always making us refocus on something else: while the trial goes on, the question of guilt is not examined directly, but under the aspect of emotion: are the two in love? For the viewer, the wife's share of guilt in her husband's death (who is presented in a deeply unsympathetic way, which only increases the effect) is a secondary consequence of that fundamental question. When the verdict is announced, Masumura cuts short the judge's announcement and has it pronounced by a bored journalist who leaves the room. The story then seems to focus on the two lovers' relationship, but this is precisely when th issue of guilt becomes central.
If in doubt, consider this image,

and consider the fact that the soundtrack to it is not the sound of the waves, but a music strongly suggesting anxiety.

In fact, from the very start, it becomes clear through framing that the film will be as much about the lovers being apart as about them being together:




Masumura never lets us fall in love with any of the two lovers.



-In this film, Masumura pays back his hommage to Oshima, who had defended him in the fifties. Some of the shots could be straight out of Cruel Tales of Youth:

In fact, one of the elements that make the film so incredibly fertile is its point at the center of so many movements: one of the many films under heavy influence by the European art cinema of the 50s (Cronaca di un amore); one of the pinnacles of the Japanese studio system (Daiei); one of the greatest examples anywhere of a film made inside the system, against the system; an aesthetic inquiry into the work of the emerging generation of new waves, throughout the world but especially in Japan... Anyone even remotely interested in how Japanese culture changed in the 1950s-60s will have to come to terms with this nexus.

"Alexis St Martin was one of the 19th century’s most important scientific guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his half-digested breakfast was pouring out of the wound from his perforated stomach, along with bits of the stomach itself – but a US army surgeon called William Beaumont was nevertheless sent for. Beaumont was pessimistic, but he cleaned the wound as best he could and was amazed the next day to find his patient still alive. It was touch and go for almost a year: St Martin survived, though with a gastric fistula about two and a half inches in circumference. It was now possible for Beaumont to peer into St Martin’s stomach, to insert his forefinger into it, to introduce muslin bags containing bits of food and to retrieve them whenever he wanted."

(here)