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.

Aria: Cinema Plays with Opera

Roeg

Aria is one of the better-known omnibus films from the 80s, a strange period of film history that almost brought together the likes of Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Derek Jarman, and Nicholas Roeg. Minus Welles, Fellini, and Allen, and plus a few others, Aria was constructed with relatively broad formal freedom but strikingly narrow thematic content. Perhaps predictably, many of these segments are very operatic indeed, paired as each of them is with a piece or two from Verdi, Puccini, and others. Considering the caliber of the filmmakers participating, it is surprising how tethered many of the shorts are to traditional operatic content. Jarman’s contribution may experiment most with the wedding of cinema with opera, offering a montage of images somewhat liberated from narrative confines and thereby allowing such a short piece to stand on its own. Roeg’s attempt to integrate narrative (from a classical source, no less) into into such strict temporal constraints results in a rushed product, something that defines neither opera nor cinema; but maybe this was his intention?

Godard

Godard is right at home here, especially following his 80s fare like Passion and First Name: Carmen. In this decade more than ever before, Godard was preoccupied with the fusing of image and sound, in the vein of Renaissance art and music. This means that he’s obsessed with the human form, male and female bodies. Historically, this creates something curiously hybrid. While classical opera may have to do with bodies, Godard’s style is decidedly closer to that of pre-Classical painting, with uncovered figures posing still in order to be admired or, better, worshiped. Godard’s use of male bodies juxtaposing the females here fits nicely into his standard approach to bodies along with everything else: exchange of commodities. The transaction doesn’t take place in the segment; the problem is an imbalance of supply with demand, a Marxist cliché that Godard is only too glad to inject into a series of films supposedly just about art and love. Such pretense is beneath him, effecting what may in fact be the most (retrospectively) comical episode of the bunch, even next to the straightforwardly funny segment with Buck Henry and Beverly D’Angelo.

Temple

Opera is in many ways a romantic medium, in both its form and content. While this probably shouldn’t be debated, Aria fascinates by its general failure to expand on the basic, proverbial romance. Exceptions have been noted above, but tongue-in-cheek and slapstick stand only on their relation to what they mock. It seems that only Derek Jarman’s episode in Aria really does justice to romantic form and narrative while experimenting successfully with a new attempt to blur the classical with the contemporary.

Jarman

Quickies, Vol. XVII

Mostly Martha/Bella Martha (2002, dir. Sandra Nettelbeck) – This is one of those food-favorite films, up there with Tampopo, Ratatouille, and even moment in Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat. (Still need to watch Le Grande Bouffe and The Thief, the Cook, His Wife, and Her Lover.) It’s a pretty classic little melodrama or something like it, but quite feel-good and touching for a European film, and a German one at that. Just plug your ears during the montages to skip the awful music and savor the beautiful culinary creations. It’s simple, and the story’s been done before, but it’s really one of those nice, unpretentious little stories that you have to enjoy.

Badlands (1973, dir. Terrence Malick) – Trying to delve into Malick (see Days of Heaven earlier), and having some trouble. These seem to have their own grammar, forcing the viewer to shift gears entirely into something more image-driven than the norm but also inseparable from its narrative content. The law is important, and there’s no escaping it ultimately. There’s a solitary joy and beauty, albeit a melancholy one, to being on the lam. And there is something quite solitary about it all, despite the fact that both of these Malick films have the male criminal coupled up with a little lady. These are really timeless, as in, without any sense of time in history. They’re their own time bombs, ticking out slowly but surely until the unavoidable cycle completes itself. These films look a lot like clichés, but there’s too much to them to be that, exactly.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963, dir. Stanley Kramer) – A comedy/satire on cinema taken to its logical ends. The whole thing is a spoof of film history, it seems, inside and out. Spencer Tracy, as the unsurpassed Captain Culpepper, is the movie audience who tries to keep tabs on all the insane plots and subplots, main characters, supporting characters, and cameos, without completely losing it. He’s inundated with more than he can keep track of while overwhelmed with his own life at the same time. There’s even a big board on the wall he uses for reference. How’s this not the cinema experience? The madness really kicks in when he fails to distinguish himself from the characters he’s been watching, delving headfirst into the craze with only one possible outcome. It’s genius in its premise and execution, particularly the scope, the cinematography, the editing, the stunts, and the music.

M

Unfortunately, to call something “textbook” rings of negative criticism. So perhaps it’s better to say, in the case of M, that Fritz Lang wrote the (text)book on cinematic sound and editing. This has been one of those embarrassing still-haven’t-seen-it films until recently, and despite high expectations, M overwhelms and astonishes the viewer for its pitch-perfect use of audio, whether through sound or silence, to create feelings of unrest, panic, suspense, disgust, and terror. There is hardly a sound in this film that isn’t essential to its theme and narrative. The same can be said for its cross-cutting, using parallel storylines to great effect and equating both sides of the law and both sides of the law-abiding as paranoid and fundamentally disrespectful of true justice. Peter Lorre’s under-performance is refreshing in an age of super-villains. It makes one wonder how much more credit Christopher Nolan and co. would have gotten for editing The Dark Knight had Heath Ledger not stolen the show. Though there are plenty of nuances separating stage and screen acting, many of them are nuances of degree and not of kind. The practice of editing, however, knowing precisely when to cut and what to put after the cut, is distinctly cinematic and raises M to a level of cinema that must have made Andre Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein proud. It also must be pointed out that both in tone and actual story, Mel Brooks seems to have borrowed from this film for Young Frankenstein.

The blind man sees

Absent

Cops...

...and robbers

Labeled

About to pop

"This won't bring our children back."

A Sentence on Ali: Fear Eats The Soul

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of the few real badasses of cinema, created in Ali: Fear Eats The Soul an utterly beautiful and (forgive the term) humanistic melodrama that draws from and expounds upon Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows through inspiration from Godard, framing-within-framing, and a realistically complex and somehow utopian picture of the human need for another that work together to blow one’s mind to discover that it was all filmed in fifteen days.

Nosferatu

My first foray into German Expressionist cinema was, fittingly, F.W. Murnau’s infamous Gothic work Nosferatu. The mother of all horror films (chronologically speaking), Nosferatu marvelously executed some great intercutting, showing parallel story lines simultaneously. And of course, Count Orlock was wonderfully “creepy,” as the film’s text pointed out explicitly a few times. Other than that, the film might be remembered mainly for the controversy it caused by supposedly violating intellectual property rights claimed by Bram Stoker’s widow for imitating Dracula a bit too overtly. Some effects were well-done for the period, such as the horse-and-carriage coming and going at breakneck speed, as well as the opening/closing doors and lid floating up and onto Orlock’s coffin. The film might have been one of the first to establish the juxtaposition prevalent in most horror films ever since, between carefree happiness (seen in Hutter waking up twice with a smile and a stretch) and sheer terror. Themes of eating and sleeping were also present, as horror feeds upon the most common and natural processes in order to instill maximum fear in the viewer. Though this was a work of Expressionism, the realism of the film was striking. Perhaps the Expressionism mostly lay in the subject/object relationship, the effect that the film has on the viewer. The effect would have been substantially less if not for the realism which fools the viewer into believing in the possibility of such horrors.

Metropolis

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was an exercise in geometric film-making laden with special effects with a political/economic admonition. At the risk of bringing up W. Anderson again, the symmetry alone makes Lang’s influence on him hard to ignore; then there’s the String Quartet in F Major by Ysaÿe Quartet, as used in Tenenbaums.

Inhuman imagery – machines, buildings, backs, lined-up, faceless, same clothes. Clock – slaves to time, schedule, machines. Uniform movement, no identity, shrouded in sameness. Height of camera – humans as ant workers. Life above: pleasure, life, interaction, animals, identity, games, smiles – counterpoint to homogeneity; love, close-ups. Massive, tiered set – balanced perfectly. 90-degree shots (vertically & horizontally). Geometric mis-en-scene. “Transforms people into a monstrous destructive power.” “Metropolis” – name implies allegory? Shots portray sense of imbalance – conflict, struggle, one side to another. Symmetry vs. lack. Strong use of foreground/background in 90-degree shots. Man becomes clock/machine in attempt to operate it, but cannot control it. “No further use for human workers.”

Robot centered – above 2 men – female – implied misogyny? Perfectly symmetrical scene. Inventor fittingly loses hand creating robot, which “dominates” him in shot. Arms on clock machine emphasize geometry, as with buildings. Tower of Babel – disconnect of communication between workers and those with ideas. Must be mediator between head & hands: heart. Christ-imagery: waiting for a mediator to deliver. Remarkable effects in transformation. Memory/dream montage sequence. “Woman”/Robot dances & entrances men: men swarm to her/it; skeleton – death with scythe; she/it incites them to violence, but real Maria has preached patience. Many 90-degree shots as machines are destroyed and flooding begins. They destroy machines and thus destroy themselves – their city is underwater & children “dead”? Identification with machines. Lack of symmetry during conflict/violence. Symmetry still interspersed. Film ends with perfectly balanced shot: one man between two others shaking hands.