Quickies, Vol. XXV: Catch-up

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards, 1961) – Been way too long since this one. It’s hard to watch it “objectively,” largely on account of its status as the origin of Audrey Hepburn’s ultimate and most everlasting image. This is interesting, considering how different her character here is from those in Roman Holiday, Sabrina, My Fair Lady, and Charade, to name a few. She is arguably at her most complex here as a solo woman living with an unnamed feline, milking men for all that they’re worth before expending them and moving on. Of course, it’s much more complex than that. She has a divided nature and deeply conflicted desires, unlike her characters from the aforementioned films. While this doesn’t necessarily maximize viewing pleasure (nor does her anorexic frame), it gives her more humanity than many of her films, which left her at the mercy of male narrative catalysts.

The Sound of Music (dir. Robert Wise, 1965) – This largely happened thanks to Oprah, whose reunification of the original cast was just enough of a novelty to warrant a watch. Was struck watching the film, prior to the show, how cohesive are the images with the words, the form with the content, the themes with the narrative. Land is important to the narrative, which features an imminent exodus from the domestic terrain and into a new one that we no more see than Moses go to see Israel. The shots embrace Austria, the songs celebrate it, and the narrative clings to it despite holding family as a higher ideal.

Ivan’s Childhood (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962) – How perfect, and, as usual for Tarkovsky, how ripe for analysis. Have watch four of his films, and two of them have here appeared in “Quickies,” which is a bummer. But if you can’t do something right, do it just barely at all. How do you put these images into words, anyway? A child in wartime trauma: openness contrasted with claustrophobia. A boy forced to live in the foolish world of men. The maternal: ever elusive, ever evasive, ever lovely. He dreams of her from the beginning; she fuels his every thought, word, and deed; in the end she is his heaven.

Gold Diggers of 1933 (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1933) – These pre-codes are so interesting, particularly in their initial display of female agency, which often swirls the bowl before getting flushed. This one has lots of little parallels with a later, code musical like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which the lovely showgirls dupe the rich men into giving them exactly what they want, whatever that may be. In both films, women belong to different types: one wants money, the other wants “love,” or something like it.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (dir. Mel Stuart 1971) -What a beaut. It may give priority to Wonka, unlike the book and the exponentially inferior remake, but when it’s Gene Wilder, how could you not? So many elements of horror are here, which any child can tell you. It’s hard, too, to deny the (biblical) allegory going on. This is about creation, beauty, free will, election, sin, death, and grace. Let’s be real: it ends with an ascension and authority extended from the creator to the one plucked from a tragic existence. Enough Genesis tropes are live and active here that, conscious or not, Roald Dahl/Mel Stuart were clearly influenced by them.

Hostel (dir. Eli Roth, 2005) – Thought it was worth a brief look into the modern slasher film, but this was too much even to finish. It certainly did well to exploit the American-youth fear of the other and turn the European fantasy vacation on its head. In the same way that classic horror tropes punish any display of sexuality in the narrative, so also is this manifest at the level of horror film history itself. This is a film defined by sexuality taken to an extreme with an extremely violent parallel. Brings new meaning to the term “horror porn.”

Quickies, Vol. IX

Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor, 1946): The tagline read, “Was there ever a woman like Gilda?” Indeed. Upon a more recent viewing of this long-been favorite, it appears much less textbook Mulvey than previously alleged. Gilda’s sort of the pawn, the tennis ball; but she’s also got more power than the two men/players combined. Would make sense to consider her the substitute for the phallic (or is it?) sword-cane that Ballin wields before Gilda’s arrival and once she’s given him up for Johnny. So the instrument only makes appearances when Ballin is sine-Gilda. She has her breakdown(s), of course, but so do the men, losing their cool in a dual of male compensation. The previously commented-upon facets remain strong and interesting, but this film as a whole stands out for defying simple genre categorization and containing what are easily some of the sauciest and sassiest scenes from 1940s American film. The above clip constitutes perhaps the best female entrance ever in cinema.

Andrei Rublev (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966): Second viewing of this one, and words continue to fall flat next to such images and the ideas, feelings, and thoughts they represent and suggest. After all, the narrative concerns an icon painter whose doubts about what lies on the other side of the images paralyze him from creating said images. How a film, above all other forms of art, could do justice to such a theme seems impossible. Something about the animals in this film, too. Horses, cows, birds – majestic, transcendent, beautiful; bruised, injured, set aflame. 205 minutes, but not a superfluous moment.

Côte d’Azur or Crustacés et Coquillages (dir. Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau, 2005): In many ways this is Feast of Love but in France and done by the French; certainly superior to the U.S. film by its relative lack of pretense. Summer vacation on the Riviera with a Parisian family who is anything but repressed in the broadly moral sense but each of them keeping and suspecting the others of keeping some illicit secrets, a number of them homosexual in nature. Has some very fun moments that seem to be inspired by Bollywood style song-and-dance routines showing up a couple times without warning. Despite the amoral element, a familial cohesion and ultimate optimism reigns that isn’t particularly true to “reality,” but in this little world the film has created, it works okay.

Rhapsody in August (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1991): Would prefer to devote extensive length to this, but alas, time again forbids. Kurosawa is back in classic form here following a string of tragedies (especially Kagemusha and Ran) and then the exquisite Dreams. Rhapsody in August has moments of The Lower Depths and Red Beard that is as “Ozu” as Kurosawa ever gets, and some aesthetic insertions that recall both Dodes’ka-den and Dreams. The outcry that this film was “blaming” the U.S. for dropping the bomb is exceedingly naive and uninformed. Of course, we did drop the bomb, twice, on hundreds of thousands of civilians. But also, this film isn’t wrestling with anything very “American,” per se, but rather with (as is very customary in Kurosawa’s oeuvre) what it is to be Japanese at this particular time in history. Being the late-2oth century, that now means dealing with the post-industrial, postwar, Westernized Japan and the ramifications of having so may of one’s progeny living in the U.S. and mixing blood with Americans. The fact that it isn’t simply “the U.S.” here but Hawaii in particular pointedly alludes to Pearl Harbor, for all those who think Kurosawa was negating any Japanese culpability in the war. Kurosawa highlights the horrific and the heavenly, the ugly and the beautiful, with an amplified and otherworldly palette of textures and colors.

Sleeper (dir. Woody allen, 1973): Still funny, still biting, still smart.

Quickies, Vol. III

Solaris (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky): Another example of non-verbal ponderings and metaphysical explorations transferred to film by the great Andrei. The only level at which the film is even a little transparent (translucent?) is its dissimilarity to Kubrick’s film. Solaris is the antithesis to 2001: in a vacuum, Brahms is silenced; what is most to be feared by alien life is self-confrontation; nothing is more horrifying than the materialization of human desires, rather than a robot gone awry; Kubrick strives for a phenomenology of the beyond and Tarkovsky brings us back to the most elemental and elementary objects, forms, thoughts, and feelings. There is no irony here, as there is in Kubrick’s; it’s nothing less than perfectly appropriate that man himself is his own doomed end.

Miss Marple - “A Pocketful of Rye” (dir. Charles Palmer): Agatha Christie’s series is apparently done justice by the Brits (who have a way of apparently doing justice to anything British…or maybe it’s just the accents) in this ably adapted and effectively enacted (I disgust myself) episode recalling that one Renoir film and Altman’s tribute to it. Reminds one of Chesterton’s Father Brown character: who wouldn’t trust a priest or old lady in a murder-mystery-type scenario? Many thanks to public television, who gave us this along with the pretty-much-perfect Cranford.

Hellboy (dir. Guillermo del Toro): Not as flashy or goofy as its sequel, it’s more rewarding upon repeated viewings. (Not that the sequel is anything less than great.) A surprisingly cohesive film with numerous threads running throughout in a tight and impressive braid. Del Toro’s horror past is evident, as are the seeds to what will be Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s pretty Roman Catholic (signaled early on by crucifixes), whereas its sequel is rather secular (a Santa Claus Christmas in its opening scene). A very red movie.

Stalker

Stalker pushes the limits of contemporary cinema, certainly of the narrative kind, past the point of normal accessibility. To break down physical spaces, colors, and textures of this film into simple psychoanalytic categories is unfair, as even Slavoj Žižek essentially concedes by wallowing in the wonder of Stalker‘s elements. Even this great thinker’s words and phrases like “post-industrial wasteland,” “Nature,” “decomposition,” and “human artifices” only barely suffice in pointing to ideas that are much more effectively captured through Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic eye. Like Andrei Rublev, one feels that Stalker is too high, too other, for standard critique. Value judgments have no place here, probably even positive ones. Human emptiness is most clearly manifest in human desires. Like a storm, at the heart of human desires there is a void, an eternal nothingness, a horrifying calm. The characters in Stalker traverse the dangerous terrain of the Zone only to arrive at the Room and turn back in despair. Too many descriptions of this film state that in the Room, “one’s deepest desires are fulfilled,” when it seems that it is one’s deepest single desire that is fulfilled there, but at a cost. Even more awful at the prospect of desires fulfilled is the desire fulfilled: the very exercise of identifying a single desire illustrates the impossibility of desires being met. The result of excursions into this reverse-Eden is deformation, nihilism, or at best, return to and embrace of the there, or as Heidegger would have it, the Dasein. As a philosophy club t-shirt once had it: “Have you hugged your Dasein today?” This may be the heart of the famous and beautiful confession/soliloquy of Stalker’s wife: faith – not religious faith per se, but the naked act of belief despite the void.

Domestic void

An extremely long take

Active elements

Relics...

...of human desire

The barren void of desire

Andrei Rublev

A quick list of the most epic epics would have to include (but of course not be limited to): Ran, Lawrence of Arabia, 1900, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Seven Samurai, Apocalypse Now and Andrei Rublev. Not only is a more abbreviated blog format striking my fancy, but justice couldn’t begin to be done to a film like this in any essay, let alone one “published” here. Thus, some notes: poetry, allegory, biography, and, for lack of a better term, “pure art”; a film about art and an artist crafted by an art poet; a film that is, fittingly, the favorite of my college English prof. An aside: why is there so often the urge – unavoidable, really – to elevate through language a work that transcends it and – whether or not it transcends it – speaks for itself? Does this inevitably cheapen the work and all others, rendering them merely the impetus for catharsis, the trigger of the sublime within me, the subject? Is that a “cheapening”? However those questions are answered, and despite the reality that Andrei Rublev can and should be subject to critical scrutiny, in the end there is just the film in all its glory and power. When one -or at least, this subject – listens to Andrei Tarkovsky himself comment on the film and its meaning, the great director himself comes up severely lacking. His summarized interpretation is comparable to describing an ocean as “wet” or the sun as “bright.” It seems to be less of an injustice to restrict this discourse to the film’s influences, backwards and forwards. These are intuitive and reflexive, so only possibly legitimate; backwards: Lang, Eisenstein, Griffith, Kurosawa; contemporary: Bergman; forwards: Kieslowski. Sequence of note: Theophanes offers partnership in art to Kirill, who at first refuses, then agrees on the condition that Theophanes come personally to his town and invite Kirill publicly and, especially, in the presence of the great Andrei Rublev. Rather than come “himself,” Theophanes sends a messenger. The messenger invites not Kirill but Andrei. Kirill is incensed, furious; he leaves the holy work for a secular career, crying out accusations of hypocrisy all the while. Andrei, meanwhile, is humbled to the point of shock and immediately drops all to follow Theophanes. Part of Kirill’s fury is due to Andrei’s assent without first consulting him. That such an allegory should fit into a narrative by the name of The Passion According to Andrei is more than fitting. That these events are followed by death, temptation, sin, flagellation, and rebirth is ineffable if not sublime.