Quickies, Vol. XXII

Duplicity (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2009) – Refreshing and helpful to see this one for the first time since the big screen. What stands out now is how it turns on its head the traditional caper movie, something that Gilroy was probably only too glad to do after penning the Bourne stuff. So what this amounts to is playing a trick on the cinema audience. Normally, as in the Oceans movies et al., we’re mostly informed as to the plan, but left in the dark about a key part of it so as to wow us at the end. That’s what we’re led to believe is happening in Duplicity, until the big upset twist at the end. The fact that it’s the corporate world that gets the best of the little guys (not to mention their corporate rival), is the movie’s reference point with reality. These days, even high-class thieves that look like Julia Roberts and Clive Owen can’t best the bigwigs in the high-rises.

A Hard Day’s Night (dir. Richard Lester, 1964) – We could by cynical about it and say it was intended to create a particular image for the Beatles, or we could be idealistic about it and say it embodied who they were, or we could be realistic and say that the truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle. Stylistically, its content is just so well-suited to its form. Despite the screaming girls in the background, John, Paul, George, and Ringo seem mostly ambivalent about them and prefer to goof off for the camera. It’s no accident that this came out just in time to incorporate a number of nouvelle vague techniques, since it was the same world that needed a major break in cinematic form as the one that needed a major change in popular music and accompanying persona.

The Palm Beach Story (dir. Preston Sturges, 1942) – Saw this one not too long ago, but just long enough ago that details are evading the memory. Recalling that everything is pretty wonderfully backwards about it; it turns the happily-ever-after story on its head, and explicitly so, from the beginning. While the rest of the country is recovering from the Depression, this couple is entering their own financial and romantic recession; or maybe Sturges thinks it’s finally kosher to joke around about financial woes. The target of his critique isn’t only the everyman, but the rich folks (“John D. Hackensacker” = John D. Rockefeller). As always dialogue and pacing are generally pretty quick; vintage Sturges. Some of the scenes, however, seem to lag on, although probably intentionally. The train car sequence is one of these, with a club of drunk men swooning over and serenading Claudette Colbert.

Frantic (dir. Roman Polanski, 1988) -Polanski is channeling Hitchcock here, as everyone can’t help but point out when they watch Frantic. It’s another case of urban spaces and the havoc they can wreak on the dweller, or, in this case, the tourist. The opening credits are overlaid on images of American Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) and his wife driving into Paris in a taxi (surely the inspiration for the opening shots of Lost in Translation and others). (The closing credits follow the couple back out of town toward the airport.) When a tire blowout halts their arrival in the city, we know immediately that Paris will throw plenty of curve balls at Walker, which he will be better at fixing than the Parisians (he seems more adept at changing the tire than the cab driver, but even then is prevented on account of a flat spare). The famous early shots in the hotel room split Walker and his wife within the same screen in both visual depth and aural fields; they often can’t hear each other or talk past each other. They’re on different pages, much in the same way that Walker won’t be able to communicate with the Parisians whose help he needs to locate his wife. So much suspense; so little that actually happens; so much depth of field; and so many of those dwarfing, claustrophobic de-profundis shots.

Point Blank (dir. John Boorman, 1967) – They call it a neo-noir, of the modernist sort (as opposed to simply “modern” or “postmodern”), since it utilizes noir themes and styles while critiquing its assumptions. That seems fair. Boorman injects formal surrealism into it, with a shockingly chaotic use of colors, liquids, cuts, and flashbacks. Walker can’t escape his past, figuratively, but we’re never quite sure if he’s escaped it literally. It may be all a dream, a vengeful fantasy. The centripetal urban space of traditional film noir is sacrificed for what L.A. really is: a sprawling, centrifugal, somehow-urban plain that scatters rather than gathers. One of the noir assumptions that Point Blank challenges and rejects is the practice of, simply, making assumptions. The one character whom Walker trusts and in whom he confides turns out to be the real enemy the whole time. This goes also for the spectator, who traditionally could trust whomever the protagonist trusts. We, like Walker, are punished for this misplaced faith. Also, instead of the war-torn gumshoe, the pretty-much upstanding private eye, we have here a war-torn criminal who’s been double-crossed. Let’s call a spade a spade; there’s something sinister lurking within the genre and there always has been, and Boorman has the guts to foreground it. Finally, can’t help but love the name “Walker,” especially when considering Dimendberg’s oft-cited work Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, particularly the chapter on the “walking cure” as the temporary fix of urban malaise.

Platinum Blonde: The Unattainable Ideal

Lioness

A most fascinating, most worthwhile viewing. In this one, Harlow is about as objectified as they come, as the title more than indicates. Early shots in the film (presumably before the director and co. realized just how useful she was) shoot Harlow from the back, on one hand an oddity but on the other all too fitting. This exploits her blonde-ness, in all its artificial glory. She looks like little more than a body with a ball of white fuzz at the top. Some kind of male fantasy, no doubt. See the recent Jenifer for a look at male obsession with the female body to the denigration of the face. (Perhaps an even more uncanny picture of this is in Chris Cunningham’s music video “Windowlicker.”) However, a shift takes place relatively early in Platinum Blonde that attempts to offer Harlow’s character (and perhaps Harlow herself) some agency.

Rear view

While still bodily objectified, she becomes more central to the film’s narrative while simultaneously becoming a major threat to that narrative. Whenever the narrative gets going, Harlow’s character appears and threatens to freeze or even kill it. The film contains a diegetic parallel to this formal and thematic fact: the film centers around a newspaper reporter (as so many Capra films do) who is interested in finding that perfect story to print in the papers. In Golden Age Hollywood films centering around the reporter, the “story”/beat is always prime. (No examples need be offered.) When Stew’s latest scoop takes him to the Schuyler manor and he rubs shoulders with Anne (Harlow), not only is the film’s narrative threatened to freeze during these moments when the viewer is encouraged to identify with Stew’s objectifying gaze of Anne, but the diegetic story that Stew is supposed to report to the paper is thrown into jeopardy. He falls in love with Anne and effectively becomes part of the story, destroying his own ability to be the storyteller as he is being paid to do. In turn, the film’s own narrative is halted due to its own inherently male gaze.

Story created or destroyed?

Romance destroyed, narrative resumed.

In at least one moment, the film’s technique betrays its own male scopophilic desire (and desire projected onto the audience) that it wants to kill the narrative. This happens midway through the film when Stew and Anne are left alone in a living room and slowly sit down together on a sofa, about to swoon over each other. During the act of sitting, the film dissolves to a close-up shot of them completing the act of sitting. This dissolve is a strange interruption during an act that requires no formal transition. While this may seem a minor detail, dissolves are not used regularly in the film. Straight cuts are much more common, even in scenes in which a dissolve might seem more appropriate. A dissolve tends to be used to transition between different scenes, while a shift to a close-up shot should only call for a simple cut. The fact that a dissolve is used indicates that an altogether different kind of scene is about to be shown, one that, in this case, halts the narrative and focuses on a sort of “lovemaking” scene. (Consider the exaggerated type of dissolve that is often used during dream sequences, and we have an idea of how this particular dissolve is being used.) Further still, two key changes take place when the shot dissolves into a new one. First, the two characters switch places on the couch, even as the shot dissolves midway through the act of sitting. This appears to be a continuity error, but in fact it probably indicates a fundamental shift in the film’s narrative by means of its discourse/form. Second, after the dissolve, they appear to sit on an altogether different couch in an altogether different room. The complete disregard for strict narrative continuity following this dissolve illustrates the power that the (male gaze of the) female body has over the narrative, as is reflected in the film form’s built-in male gaze.

About to sit...

...sitting/dissolving...

...narrative dissolved.

Incidentally, another fascinating aspect of Platinum Blonde, which is again nothing unusual in the newspaper/reporter/early-Hollywood style, is seen in the homosexual undercurrents in the male lead. The His Girl Friday-type character in this film, Gallagher (Loretta Young), is distinctively male-like in her attitude, dress, and treatment by fellow reporters. Nonetheless, in one of the film’s early scenes, Stew and Gallagher are implicated in mutual desire even though, behind the curtain, no hanky-panky occurs. And it isn’t that Gallagher and Stew don’t have the seeds of desire for one another (particularly Gallagher for Stew); it’s rather that Stew resists Gallagher, who perpetually keeps him in her sights. In this way, Gallagher turns the gaze on its head in what is an early foreshadow of Stew’s castration. While he seems the self-confident, masculine reporter, Stew becomes an emasculated trophy husband. His lack of desire for Gallagher (a female friend with a male name) feminizes him, and Gallagher’s desire for him puts her in the male, pursuant position. Anne/Harlow, on the other hand, ultimately stands for some kind of fear of the status quo. She is the dream girl, the one all the boys at work whoop and holler over. But once Stew marries her, he is unable to wield his masculinity and eventually succumbs to his original place, where, despite his lack of desire for Gallagher the brunette, he settles into a romance of class equality but devoid of the kind of distinctly heterosexual eroticism that Anne was able to offer, unlike Gallagher.

What's that behind the curtain?

Shower scene

Brunette...

...wannabe blonde.

Caught in the non-act

"Get back in yer place," or, return to the way things ought to be.

Arsenic and Old Lace: Morbidly Queer, Symbolically Odd

Unsettling

One has only to browse through comedies on Netflix with Cary Grant to see how overused is the term “screwball comedy.” (It seems that there, every film must fit into at least three genres.) While a legitimate sub-genre in which many said Grant comedies comfortably fit, a film like Arsenic and Old Lace is one of many that is more than just screwball, though it may contain some of its elements. Genres aside, though, every film deserves the chance to be examined beyond how it fits into larger categories. This one begins with a sequence in Ebbets Field in Brooklyn during a Dodgers game. The game quickly erupts into a fistfight between players and umpires, the sort of scene that is far too outrageous to happen with any kind of regularity in normal life, but which is presented in the film as another day in the life in Brooklyn (read: America). The film cuts to the other side of the river to one of the most serene little neighborhoods in the country where, we are told, two of the sweetest souls ever to grace the earth live.

A violent pastime

This introduction sets the film up for an ironic correlation between both sides of the river. We are to believe at the outset that one side features daily chaos and the other is a world of peaceful goodwill. The fact that the latter world is in fact a strange perversion of peaceful goodwill places the whole status of Brooklyn and the Americana that it represents in a questionable state. Why “Americana”? The use of baseball as a starting point for the film places the film in the realm of national identity, baseball having already been determined the “national pastime” of the United States. The game’s location is an urban context, across the river from a domestic one where the film’s main narrative takes place. The urban in all of its newness makes an appearance, then the domestic and its echoes of the historical past. Frank Capra, the film’s director, was an outspoken patriot and critic of the United States. His wartime propaganda films superficially reflect extreme, blind patriotism; but popular films like It’s A Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington are as quick to critique the American status quo as they are to embrace them. In Arsenic and Old Lace, Capra appears simultaneously to celebrate and condemn the American condition in the early 1940s. His use of Gothic imagery and themes, so uncommonly associated with comedy in this period of American film, turn conventional audience expectations on their heads.

Textual deceit, subtextual irony

The setting of the house in the film is a precursor to the Bates house in Psycho nearly twenty years later. Most of the cinematic action in the house is seen on the main floor, representative of the ego, the social self. Upstairs is the realm of the superego, the ideal (for Bates, where he cares for his mother as a loving son; for Teddy, where he is President Theodore Roosevelt), and the basement is the realm of the id, the ugly other repressed within (for Bates, where he is his mother; for the ladies in Arsenic where they bury a dozen bodies of men they have “mercifully” killed). For as Freudian as this architecture is, it is unsurprising that one of the most interesting takes on Arsenic and Old Lace has been a distinctly Freudian reading on the use of the Gothic and homosexuality in the film: “A Secret Proclamation: Queering the Gothic Parody of Arsenic and Old Lace,” Jason Haslam in Gothic Studies, Nov. 1, 2005.

Self-persuasion/delusion

Looking carefully at a number of the changes Capra made to the source material of the film – the play of the same name – Haslam observes a homoerotic subtext in the film that translates into the film, both through and despite the changes. First, the character of Mortimer (Cary Grant) makes an even more desperate display of heterosexual desire in the film than he does in the play, even as the story begins with him making an about-face following years of disavowing the institution of marriage to the point of writing books praising the virtues of bachelorhood. The shift Mortimer makes is curious and causes one to wonder just what would have prompted it. A number of hints at homosexuality in other characters, Haslam argues, reveals Mortimer’s quick engagement and subsequent marriage as a flee toward the symbolic order in response to various challenges to that order in the lives of those around him. Haslam wisely avoids any assumptions about the two aunts and focuses more heavily on Jonathan (Mortimer’s long-lost, evil brother) and his partner-in-crime Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre). The casting of Lorre in the role of Einstein would already sound the bell to the film’s original audience of a homosexual deviant, having made such a splash with a character of that nature in The Maltese Falcon. Further, though Haslam doesn’t mention it, one of Lorre’s most famous roles prior to his entrance into Hollywood was in Fritz Lang’s M, in which he played a child molester; certainly someone associated with sexual deviance. Haslam points out that in this era of the Hays Production Code, audiences were more adept at discerning subtextual meanings that weren’t permitted to be overtly stated.

For the throat

Further, Haslam makes a rather convincing argument for the association of homosexuality with the fact that Jonathan is constantly being told he looks like Boris Karloff. Karloff, famous for playing Frankenstein’s monster in the Frankenstein series, actually played the role of Jonathan in the stage play and would have played him in Capra’s film had he not been an investor in the play and thus unable to withdraw from production to star in the film. Karloff has always been associated with Frankenstein’s monster and all things horrific, and Dr. Einstein’s admission that he surgically altered Jonathan to resemble Karloff following a drunken viewing of a film (presumably Frankenstein) reveals Einstein’s affinity for the film and the character. Haslam offers evidence that Mary Shelley’s story, so often adapted, contains numerous homosexual elements, which are being exploited for their subtextual association in Arsenic and Old Lace. The premise of Frankenstein is a violation of the symbolic order, bringing back to life what once was dead. In the same way, homosexuality is considered contrary to heteronormativity, a position that would not only have been taken for granted by the film’s audience but which, arguably, the film encourages in most of its narrative. Further still, the murders that the aunts commit are obvious violations of the symbolic order, as is Mortimer’s earlier attempt to live life outside of the bounds of marriage. Mortimer’s eventual flight to a woman and the institution of marriage indicate his attempt to rid himself of the violations to the order being committed by his family and not only into marriage with a woman, but with a woman who is the daughter of a minister, a traditional keeper of the symbolic, heteronormative order.

Swordly lacking

Interestingly, Haslam points out that a key scene toward the film’s end in fact challenges the heteronormative order by positioning the viewer with the character of Dr. Einstein more than with anyone else; even Mortimer. As Mortimer continually puts off his consummation with Elaine (certainly showing his true, non-normative colors), he becomes more and more defined by the same kind of lack that defines his brother Teddy. Thinking his is Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy repeatedly runs up the stairs in the film yelling, “Chaaaaaaaarge!!!” and wielding an invisible sword. The non-sword he unsheathes and holds before him connotes his lack of a phallus, and so when Mortimer is driven to the point of performing the same act, he finally associates himself with the lack of both power and sense of identity that define Teddy. Mortimer’s constant efforts to put Teddy, Jonathan, and his two aunts in the care of Happy Dale Sanitarium exemplify his desire to put things back into their right place, to highlight boundaries that are being repeatedly and horrifically violated. Toward the film’s end, Einstein and Jonathan have a conversation in which Jonathan is seen only in his profile shadow on the wall. In so doing, the film identifies the viewer with the face of Einstein, fearful of Jonathan’s sadomasochistic desires for Einstein, Mortimer, and a host of others. Jonathan’s deviance is of a different kind and degree as Einstein’s, and so when the film moves toward its conclusion and Einstein is comedically set free despite having been described by a police officer, the audience is positioned mentally and emotionally with the exhausted Einstein. What is fascinating about this identification is that it ends up “queering” viewer engagement with Einstein rather than with Mortimer, who is heteronormalized against the grain of the film’s setting and other main characters. Mortimer continues to force the symbolic order by kissing Elaine in order to keep her from telling the police about the bodies she has discovered in the basement. Mortimer’s heterosexual desire has never been more apparent than it is in this scene, and it is a desire that serves ends rather than simply satisfying true love. Having been revealed to be unrelated by blood to all the deviants in his “family,” Mortimer wants nothing more than finally to consummate his marriage and escape from the suburban space of perversion.

Shamed into marriage

Imprisoned

Double-teamed

Lovebuddies

Broken engagement

Ropeburn

Contagious lack

Tschüß!

Concluding violation

Jenifer: Stage 4 Clinger, or, Psycho Hose Beast

Echoes of Frankenstein's monster

The popularity of contemporary horror is such that even “Masters of Horror” like Italian director Dario Argento are hired to do episodes in low-budget TV series of that name. Horror, as a sub-section of film theory in general, is well established in all of its tropes and themes to the point of being old hat. One of the more helpful recent studies on horror is Linda Williams’ attempt to situate the genre within a three-category grouping she terms “the body genres.” Along with melodrama and pornography, Williams argues that these three film genres aim to achieve a distinctly physical reaction in its viewers. Melodrama is the “tear-jerker,” horror is the “fear-jerker,” and pornography is the “j***-off.” For a film in one of these genres to be successful, it ought as a rule to provoke sorrow/happiness, fright, and arousal, respectively. Horror makes particular use of diegetic bodies (bodies within the films) in its attempts to effect fear in the viewer’s body. The episode “Jenifer” evokes this along with the now-classical horror trope of the monstrous feminine.

Domestic disturbance

Typically in horror, a display of desire or sexuality – especially on the part of a woman but also applicable to men – is the immediate precursor to death in the film’s narrative. Once you see someone about to get it on, you know someone is about to meet his/her end. Insofar as films in general presuppose a male spectator (Mulvey, again), horror utilizes viewer engagement to exploit repressed male fears of women (i.e., the castrated other), whether it be the monstrous feminine, the Medusa figure, the V-dentata, or whatever. “Jenifer” takes this fear and maximizes it by conflating the dreaded effects of desiring the woman into the monstrous feminine body and hinting strongly at the V-dentata. The V-dentata theory from ages past is evident first of all in Jenifer’s face and second in the literal castration that she enacts upon one of her male victims. The males in this episode irresistibly desire Jenifer, though they are at the same time also terrified of her and repelled by her. In this way, what Jenifer arguably represents more than the horrific, monstrous feminine is the even more horrific male desire for the feminine. Even fully aware of the imminent fate she will inflict upon the man, he cannot get away from her and indeed doesn’t try to do so. Freud argued that castration anxiety encouraged male fears of women, fears that men negotiate by either objectifying women or idealizing them; two sides of the same coin. The fact that the male protagonist in “Jenifer” is a police officer (an authority figure of the “law,” a key concept in Freud) all the more solidifies his castration anxiety. As one who wields weapons in law enforcement, he maintains patriarchal boundaries that define social order. His inability to maintain personal order leads directly to his failure as a cop and eventual fate at the hands of his own desire, viz. Jenifer.

The monstrous other

Other types of films make attempts to collapse the distance between the spectator and the screen, essentially either fooling the audience or persuading the audience that the film is dealing with real enough concerns that warrant entrance into its world. A recent look at Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar is arguably one of these films, one that many argue is reaching for transcendental themes that usurp the distinction between the viewer and the viewed, the subject and the object, and invite the viewer into its world, which is also the real world. By its attempt to “transcend” the “real” world even by using it as a springboard into a realm of meta-ideas, such a film as Bresson’s may also aim to transcend such bodily reactions as a horror film/episode like “Jenifer” wants to elicit. It is most likely exactly this dependence on bodily reactions that keep these body genres alive and well. As stated above, horror theory is well established to the extent that there seems in some ways little else to investigate other than contemporary illustrations of classical theory. The genre’s continued popularity is manifest (like the other two genres) in the numerous low-budget films and serial programs, not to mention amateur internet material, that are being produced constantly. It seems to be the bodily addiction to these genres that maintain their popularity above the non-body genres.

Au hasard Balthazar: Handle with Care

There are many and eclectic takes on Robert Bresson’s work, and only a little on which there is unanimity. The consensus is essentially that his films are marvelous, beautiful, formally excellent, and verbally elusive. Paul Schrader’s well-known work Transcendental Style in Film gives equal weight to the films of Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer, arguing that the films of all three of these – especially Bresson and Ozu – reach toward transcendental themes by means of a transcendental style. That which is transcendental is that which transcends the merely earthly, mortal, and temporal. Sara Anson Vaux’s essay “Divine Skepticism: The Films of Robert Bresson” (Christianity and Literature, Vol. 53, No. 4, Summer 2004) takes a much needed twist on Schrader’s thesis and acknowledges the earthly and temporal concerns that Bresson’s films include. Vaux equates the efforts that have been made to reduce Bresson’s films to their “spiritual” import to the movement to remove the historical element from the person of Jesus and mythicize him into the “Christ of faith.” Brian Price’s “The End of Transcendence, the Mourning of Crime: Bresson’s Hands” (Studies in French Cinema, 2002, Vol. 2, Issue 3) conducts an intertextual analysis of the diegetic use of hands in Bresson’s films, arguing that close-ups on hands in later films find their referents in hands in earlier films. Dana Polan’s essay on the film in Senses of Cinema makes the provocative case that the spiritualist readings of Au hasard Balthazar (and by implication, most of the rest of Bresson’s films) are misguided and naive, missing the point that Bresson was in fact much more materialist and Godardian than has been acknowledged.

Anything from a quick glance to careful attention to Bresson’s films should cause one to acknowledge the ease with which many come to transcendental or spiritual conclusions about the filmmaker and his films. Biblical and religious imagery and iconography is used, and at some points explicitly religious – Christian – narrative content is the focus (see Diary of a Country Priest). Beyond that, Bresson’s affinity for Dostoevsky (a Christian) led to some loose adaptations of aspects of Dostoevsky’s novels (see Pickpocket). And while Schrader’s study may be a little quick to jump to conclusions and lump films together (both within one director’s oeuvre and across those of multiple directors with an allegedly similar style), the basic premise that many of Bresson’s films are unique by virtue of their serious themes and nearly illegible form shouldn’t be countered. Donald Richie concludes that the vast variety of readings of Bresson’s films points both to their difficulty and to their versatility of meaning. By collapsing much of the distance between the screen and the spectator, Bresson invites the viewer into the film process, leading to, as Richie admits happened to himself, a confusion between the film and life itself. In terms of its themes, Godard is probably right to have said that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half.”

In terms of its events and characters, to say nothing of its style, the film reaches a level of poetry that is as foreign to daily reality as poetic discourse is to casual conversation. Is this poetry simply a variation of the visual free-form verse in Godard’s materialist films, as perhaps Polan would like to argue? Certainly their is a tonal difference between the two. Contrast Au hasard Balthazar with a film like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. Godard’s rapid cutting, chaotically colorful imagery, and graffiti-covered concrete structures sarcastically and ironically rebel against capitalism and traditional politics of both cinematic and social conventions. Au hasard Balthazar, on the other hand, gives a slight but definite priority to Bazin over Eisenstein. The image is primary, along with its accompanying sound. The connection between images is deeply important, to be sure, but while Godard’s film leans toward visual abstraction, Bresson’s film grounds itself in images of familiarity, then raises them above our experience but first through it. Use of words like “raise,” “transcend,” and the like is unavoidable with a film like Au hasard Balthazar despite the paradoxical fact that Polan is right about a materialist element existing in it. While a Godard film like Une Femme Mariée fractures the human body in order to confront the fractured nature of existence and the commodification of the self, Bresson’s arms and legs, as Price does well to observe, are indexes of the self and more expressive of the inner person than the face or the body as a whole could otherwise be.

So is Au hasard Balthazar simply a subjective version of Godard’s objectification? If it is, it takes a step that Godard’s films as a rule do not take. When the naif is raised by his scoundrel cronies and seated on the donkey Balthazar, then hailed as he rides down the cobblestone street, biblical imagery is clearly being evoked. When the man looks up to heaven and proceeds to drop dead, falling off the donkey never to arise, the biblical image becomes ironic but not sarcastic. It may reflect a failure of the man to achieve Christ-like status, but the emphasis is on the attempt and the failure, not on the silliness of the image or the idea. To say simply what it does reflect is not to exclude a host of other things, though; Richie accurately insists that the easiest way to misread the film is to apply a single meaning to any image or series of images. Because of this fact, a thorough reading of the film is a challenge, since the film itself challenges the spectator to enter into its world and conflate it with the real world (a worthy conflation indeed). To give a thorough reading of Au hasard Balthazar is to give a thorough reading of life, or so many critics have felt after viewing it. Some things don’t seem to make sense in it, but many things in life don’t make sense, and making sense of poetry is often misses the point of the poem.

D.O.A.: Noir Town

Had been probably 15+ years since last seeing this one. (Yes, we watched public domain films noir as children.) Despite some comical screenwriting – and some exceedingly strange “woo-woo” sound effects whenever anything with shaved legs walked by the protagonist at the film’s beginning – D.O.A. is in many ways prototypical of the classic film noir. The film’s first scene illustrates the genre’s fatalism, as Frank Bigelow stumbles into a police station to announce his own murder. Still breathing, and still able to recount exactly what happened, he tells the cops that he’s been murdered, and he refers to himself throughout the film (told in retrospect) as dead. At the conclusion, the cop in charge declares him D.O.A. – dead on arrival – despite the fact that he had enough breath in him to tell a fairly lengthy and complicated story before finally dying. What has already happened as much defines the present and the future as it already does the past, and so the point of this narrative is not to keep Bigelow from dying but rather to uncover what will, irreversibly, cause him eventually to die. In this universe, a person is at the mercy of the forces around him, and the only way to wield any sense of self and autonomy is to know what happens; never to change what might happen.

This is L.A., of course, with a brief and deadly jaunt up to San Francisco. The fateful trip makes D.O.A. reminiscent of Thieves’ Highway, except time constraints require air travel here rather than produce trucks in Dassin’s film. The city is ruthless enough that business and recreation are equally dangerous pursuits, overlapping with one another to such an extent that Bigelow can’t have a pleasant drink at a bar in a city over 300 miles away without inadvertently imbibing on poison. Once he knows he’s absorbed the poison and is destined to die, he alternately walks, runs, and trips around town: see Edward Dimendberg’s description of the “walking cure” in films noir. Thanks to urban agoraphobia and claustrophobia, the urban dweller must attempt to negotiate the artificial jungle by walking. This intends to achieve a sense of open space, direction, and subjective bearings. D.O.A. exploits well-known city landmarks in both L.A. and San Francisco during these walking cure sequences, connecting the need to walk (a subjective urge) with city landmarks (impersonal objects).

It’s a man’s world, although one that he can’t dominate on his own. Forces greater than he overwhelm him, and even when such forces are personified, they are revealed only as cogs in a larger machine of moral malaise. Women, on the other hand, if they aren’t femme fatales, are survivors who don’t so much dodge bullets as stand by as bullets land on their men. In D.O.A., she’s a nag who won’t shut up, won’t stop intruding where she isn’t wanted, and is fairly consistently regarded as inept to solve any problems. She’s forgotten, literally by the male protagonist (whose promise to return to her is utterly disregarded as he goes instead to the police station), and therefore by the film’s narrative which is sutured completely to him. There is no heaven in the noir world of D.O.A., and not even a haven. The closest thing to it is a police station run by cynical cops who would rather interrogate a “murdered” man than bother to ask if he’d like one last cup of coffee. For those interested in watching it on the small screen, it’s available here. Bunch of the stills from here.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days: Inner Spaces, Camera Politics and the Lone Woman

Current research interests have prompted recent re-visits of Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth. Next up: Waitress, Juno (sigh), and Knocked Up. These all came out within about a year of each other in 2006/2007 and have at least one thing in common. But more on that later. The Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days was highly acclaimed, even winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2007. There are debates out there as to whether the film’s meaning is to be found chiefly in its political background (the last days of Communism in Hungary) or its narrative foreground (a clandestine abortion). Incidentally, this aspect of the film shares a huge amount in common with Children of Men, which Žižek insists is all about the background. Like Children of Men, however, the title and foreground (at least) of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days suggest more than just politics.

The long take is a technique that challenges traditional cinematic politics since Eisenstein, tethered as it is to the Hollywood style and system with its flashy editing that forces the viewer down a particular optical avenue. The long take, on the other hand, as a rule tends to defy the traditional power-grab of the filmmaker and allow the viewer a freer range of thought and vision within a frame (at least in theory); Bazin notwithstanding. Certainly, the meaning of the frame rests largely on what is outside of its boundaries; this is the case no matter what the editing. The digital trickery Children of Men, creating the impression of long takes that in fact hide Hitchcockian cuts (see Rope), conceivably undercuts this apolitical technique. Or, perhaps the deceit aligns coherently with the film’s narrative content. On the other hand, plenty of films defined by the long take seem equally defined by their political agendas. When the theoretical becomes concrete, all bets are off. In 4 Months, the long take contrasts with that in Children of Men by lingering on uncomfortable scenes with little or no camera movement. The camera seems there in the room, but hidden, rather than the documentary-style cinematography of Children of Men. Rather than intrusive, it is static and surveillance-like, a method that also aligns perfectly with the film’s background of a Communist regime that is always potentially watching. And whereas Children of Men‘s narrative has to do with the film’s events and the large, social response to those events, 4 Months‘ narrative revolves around the responses of particular characters to the film’s events.

Spaces also play an important role here. Almost none of the film is shot outdoors, and those parts that are outdoors relate to a sense of agoraphobia within the characters. The outside is so dominated by the regime, the totalitarian presence, that the indoors are equated with something nearer to “safety.” Tropes of the Anne Frank attic are utilized, the notion of the corner as a safe haven. Apartments and hotels can function this way, unlike houses. Houses are large nests of safety with multiple tiers and corners within; apartments are themselves corners with doors that shut out other foreign, yet also inside, spaces. In the hotel here, there is still the impression of prison; “guests” may not enter and exit at will. Their passports are confiscated during their tenure in the rooms, and they cannot make a discrete exit from the building. The bathroom space in the hotel is exploited for the sake of the narrative of 4 Months. It becomes the realm of safety once the hotel “corner” is violated, intruded upon, raped. The room space was supposed to be safe and sterile, medically and otherwise. Once the doctor reverses his role and becomes more interested in his own dirty form of pre-payment, the women escape to the bathroom to cleanse themselves, flush out intrusive elements, and expel the fetus before it can be disposed of elsewhere. The unavoidable presence of the regime even in indoor spaces, spaces with the pretense of safety, renders the entire world of Communist Romania both dangerous and oppressive.

The sociopolitical background of the film becomes foregrounded during the sequence at the boyfriend’s parents’ home. The viewer has been primarily engaged with the character of Otilia until this point, and now the engagement becomes even stronger. An extremely long take keeps the focus on Otilia at the dinner table as a group of middle-aged, middle class couples complains about how much easier the younger generation has it these days. The camera seems as uncomfortable as Otilia and her boyfriend, even as it remains transfixed on her throughout the ordeal. Having come from being voluntarily raped for the sake of her roommate’s successful abortion, the dialogue demonstrates the fundamentally oblivious middle-class even as the Communist regime attempts to collapse class boundaries. Who is punished most during the process of socialization? Not those for whom it attests to exist.

Whatever the predispositions and agendas of the filmmaker, the film itself is remarkably neutral toward the main narrative concern of executing a successful abortion under the radar of the authorities, who have declared it illegal. Further, this abortion takes place almost exactly halfway through the pregnancy, making the act technically a murder under Hungarian law at the time, rather than a lesser charge when an abortion takes place during the first trimester. Viewers with strong agendas for the rights of women or the unborn could easily both make a strong respective case using evidence for this film and come up wanting. Abortion may be in the narrative foreground, but the film uses it as a tool to explore the experience of a women and her roommate who have chosen – for a reason that isn’t made particularly clear – to take an enormous risk by breaking a serious law. Predictably, there is no definitive conclusion of any kind, to say anything of a happy ending. Since the governmental situation remains the same at the film’s end as it does at the beginning, any real sense of conclusion would be superficial. The film gives priority to the character of Otilia, avoiding melodrama and siding the audience with the much more intelligent woman in the film. And while Otilia’s actions reflect faithfulness, loyalty, and strength, to emphasize these aspects of her character would be equally as superficial as a reading of Children of Men that focuses on Theo’s character transformation, although these may be important components of the films. However, by emphasizing the character of Otilia over narrative events, the film does raise this component over the narrative. Returning to the long take, this technique can be utilized to various effects. In Children of Men, the long take tends to highlight narrative events, action sequences. In 4 Months, the long take typically highlights the character of Otilia; her responses to events, her feelings of what is happening around her, pondering the next course of action. So while very little transformation takes place in the character of Otilia – other than a new sobriety at the harshness of her existence – the film subtly seems to function as an apologia for women. Otilia’s ultimate success in helping to pull off the abortion – using her sexuality, her intelligence, and her courage – brings her character and all its ramifications to the foreground and relegates the narrative to the background, along with the politics.

Clip of the Day 9/14

Many thanks to TTM…who sent me this ages ago and I neglected to post it before now.

Quickies, Vol. XXI

Une Femme Mariée (dir. Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) – Have read it said that this one empowers women, but that’s about the most superficial, narrative-prejudicial sort of reading one can imagine. Do not the first umpteen shots in the film so fracture the female body that the rest of the film can only be seen through that violent lens? This is Vivre sa vie but less coherent, less worked through. The woman is either mother or whore, sometimes both, but never neither. The headshots alone create either the most uncomfortable viewing experience or the most obliviously pleasurable. She is so framed, so polished, so posed, so (sigh) objectified, and JLG knows it all too well. This is apparently the point, and one that he never seemed to tire of making in the same basic way so repeatedly.

"I'm Tom Jane."

Under Suspicion (dir. Stephen Hopkins, 2000) – Pretty much the worst. You can be a nihilist, but you still have to mean something.

The Rescuers (dir. Wolfgang Reitherman et al., 1977) – Not much to report. Fun in places, perhaps stands out by virtue of being Disney, being animated, and not being a musical in the usual Disney sense.

The Rescuers Down Under (dir. Hendel Butoy & Mike Gabriel, 1990) – They say, the first fully totally digitally animated film made. The opening shot alone is worth one’s viewing. After that, the first 15 minutes or so are alone worth one’s viewing. The animators are clearly having fun here, exploiting their new computers to maximum effect, and it’s pure visual pleasure. Sure, you miss the little pencil imperfections from The Jungle Book and Robin Hood, but this is a new breed of Disney, and one that works well. Ensemble of characters that maintains the spirit of the good ones and opened a brief, great period of Disney films that has now been overtaken by Pixar/Disney.

The Awful Truth (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937) – A predictable (but that’s the point, right?) bit of classic code-era Hollywood fare. It creates the initial impression of raciness, suggesting divorce, but then comes full circle and celebrates raciness within its boundaries, not unlike It Happened One Night. So, like The Philadelphia Story but not as good. Cary Grant & Irene Dunne click together almost as well as Grant and Jean Arthur, but Ralph Bellamy does well to offer some Southern, masculine flare.

Eight Miles High (dir. Achim Bornhak, 2007) – A German biopic on the infamous groupie Uschi Obermaier. A major problem with many biopics is the impression that the filmmakers don’t need to defend their content on the basis of it being a “true story.” This seems to be one of the problems here. Just because it “happened” doesn’t make it film-worthy. And in some cases, a particularly interesting true story doesn’t make for a great film. Eh.

The American, or, The Americennui

Anton Corbijn’s career has mostly consisted of photography and music video direction, so presumably he’s jumped across the extremes of how to speak the language of images without music and, in some sense, depending on it quite heavily. Not that The American doesn’t have an interesting musical soundtrack, but it is used minimally, along with dialogue and narrative, to the priority of images and silence. The influence of Antonioni and Kubrick is alive here, a refreshing fact for a film marketed as an action movie but actually a kind of anti-Bourne film. Matt Damon’s character is much more adept than Clooney’s, although both fundamentally want to settle down in a monogamous relationship far away from their darker careers and abandon their murderous training. Instead of migraine-inducing cross-cutting from Paul Greengrass in the second and third installments of the Bourne trilogy, Corbijn allows the camera to linger for lengthy periods, giving the viewer the opportunity to experience the multi-faceted geometry of the frame. Since the width and depth of the shots are what give them their unique meaning, the audience is asked to flex their genre expectations if they want to “get” this film.

It should be said that both techniques – that of the Bourne movies and The American – are perfectly appropriate to the respective grammars that the films are using and the different correlations to the characters and stories. In the Bourne films, camera work often corresponds with the mental state of Jason Bourne and his accompanying headaches. The challenge to the viewer is, sort of, to keep up with him. In The American, Clooney’s character Jack is on a different wavelength. His career is winding down, but not necessarily by choice (although in part, yes). He’s distracted, his mind is elsewhere, he’s less pragmatic than Bourne and more pensive. The nature of his thoughts is rarely verbalized, except in images. When he does speak, he contradicts himself and proves himself a liar. “I’m not good with machines,” he says more than once, only then to demonstrate to the audience and even the other filmic characters his high level of competence with firearms and ammunition. “I came here to get pleasure, not to give it,” he tells a prostitute, but only after doing quite the opposite (with an unflinching, lingering camera the whole way through).

The photographic nature of this film’s discourse usurps Corbijn’s other attempt: the use of the symbolic. This is dangerous territory for a filmmaker, and Corbijn’s rather hesitant insertion of symbolic elements, which are themselves very overt, makes the film either ambiguous or too much the opposite. The butterfly has long been an obvious symbol of regeneration, new life, resurrection, etc. The application of this symbol to Jack may simply be paradoxical, or allude to the ultimate meaninglessness of life and death; but it may distract from the main images the way endnotes distract from the main text of a book. The butterfly is tattooed on him, and real butterflies start making appearances as the film moves forward. It’s a nearly extinct species, of course, a fact to which Jack has access by virtue of his interest in the natural world despite his profession.

For having a grammar that’s something like Antonioni’s, and even some corresponding ennui, Corbijn thinks more of eros than the great Italian director. Life is meaningless and unpredictable, but if anything is worth shooting for, it’s something very traditional, erotically speaking. Whereas Antonioni believed that eros was sick and in need of a cure, Corbijn seems to suggest that it is the cure, albeit an elusive one. This is strangely ironic, since the film’s first (or second?) shot is highly evocative of the final shot of L’Avventura: from behind, a woman caressing the head of her beloved during a moment of intimate silence, peering at an intangible beauty in front of them and divided through their own posturally and sartorially.

A postscript: the priest in this film is one of the most suggestive diegetic figures. First, the casting is quite interesting. Paolo Bonacelli has been a pretty prolific Italian actor since the 60s, but his most famous roles include characters in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló and Caligula, two of the most infamously depraved films ever produced. As a European, Corbijn is fully aware of this, and so Bonacelli’s casting as a clerical figure is immediately dubious. Second, the questionable nature of the casting is confirmed within the film when the priest turns out to have an immoral background of his own. Shortly after meeting Jack, Father Benedetto interrogates him on the history of Abruzzo, where Jack claims he is taking landscape and architecture photographs. When Jack comes up with no knowledge of the area, Father Benedetto chastises him, equating his ignorance of history with being a typical American. Toward the film’s denouement, Jack realizes that the priest has a secret illegitimate child. When Jack confronts him on the matter, the priest says it was a long time ago and he can’t remember much about it. So the priest is as guilty as Jack of neglecting history and relying on his own constructed self of the present. The fact that it is a priest whose hypocrisy is exposed, parallel with a hit man, seems to conflate the two poles of morality and history into a double failure of narcissistic, nihilistic amnesiacs.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: Bad Cop, Bad Cop

Another review-style blurb, this one published over here.

Mashup: The Big Lebowski & The Matrix