Off to Hell in a Handbasket...Or the Farmers Market

The Future of Food is the documentary equivalent to a Tommy Lee Jones disaster movie. Whereas the former is more of a “what the heck” experience, the latter is definitely an “oh shit” phenomenon. The difference is that in something like Volcano there is Tommy Lee Jones to save the day, and as a spectator there is actually nothing you can do to stop the volcano. This is not the case with The Future of Food. It is a film about large corporations genetically altering seeds and patenting them, thus privatizing the world’s food source. Sadly, when Tommy is really needed, he’s nowhere to be seen. Even Nicolas Cage is AWOL; most likely, he’s gawking at some other horrible catastrophe.

Unlike its fictional brethren, The Future of Food would like to have its audience believe that they can make a difference in the story on screen. The closing montage suggests such an illusion. A young boy bites into a lush, red, organic strawberry (the same iconography as the “evil-ones” use) and as he pulls it away - a pure, natural libation - the frame freezes. The audience is told that the choice is up to us. Cut to a shot of a dandelion, whose seeds are blowing away, reminding the audience both that natural foods are a fragile, impermanent existence, but also that they have to power to “blow” the corporations away.

This is manipulative, because if you pay attention to the entire film, emphasized over and over again is how incessant this gene research is. It is such a one-sided film, with the organic revolution represented by farmers and liberal intellectuals, and the genetic researchers represented by large tractors (that appear to be mowing down fields rather than cultivating them), men in biohazard suits, planes spreading pesticides, and the solitary title-card that reveals only a limited list of the benefits that genetic research has accomplished. The imagery falls into the classical propaganda category perfectly. For a moment, just consider how Eisenstein contrasted the chaotic, confused – emotional – civilians fleeing the mechanical, ordered – unemotional – soldiers attacking on the Odessa Steps. Man vs. Machine, with the future of humanity placed in so assuredly in man. Even Fritz Lang was worldly enough to place the blame not on technology, but in mankind’s use of it (all of his post-Metropolis films emphasize this by pitting the solitary man against the group).

But I’ve gotten away from the other point of comparing The Future of Food to a disaster movie: it is a disaster movie. Like another of its brethren, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, Food carries the double duty of informing the public, as well as trying to have an immediate effect. Moore’s was to influence the U.S. 2004 vote against George W. Bush; Food's is to continue the support of farmers markets, which has been on the increase for nearly a decade, as well as the on-going consumer protests against the genetic alteration of seeds, which is turning into an Orwell-esque monopoly that has the support and financing of the big “G”: government. It is this feud, between the Capra-esque “little guy” and the oppressive, Republican government that forms the emotional core of the film. And it is emotional, vehemently so. Filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia is convinced of her film’s position, and throws at the screen every piece of evidence to help win over believers, be it the stories of farmers dogged by corporations (sued out of their retirement fund) or percentile facts – or even the simple truth that the entire EU avoids all this drama by labeling genetically altered foods. In the process, Garcia seem to forget about “the other side” to every argument; thus, the film feels more like a religious gathering than a pro-organic convention. And perhaps there is actually something to be said for that.

Corpse Bride Limp Despite Rigor Mortis

Tim Burton’s most recent venture, the animated Corpse Bride, is an experiment with macabre naivety. It’s not soulful, though, not in the way it should be. Rather than crushing children’s securities, indulging into the fascination of nightmares, Burton whittles away at the macabre like an unskilled woodcarver until all that’s left is a shapeless piece of wood, just a little smaller, a little easier to handle. More than anything, the story is smelling-salt of the Spielberg variety, where fantasies are crushed by the monstrosities of adulthood: law, order, and rational.

Necrophilia, as foreign as it sounds to children’s movies, is never quite so removed from its exoticness as in Corpse Bride: it is not so much avoided as it is ignored (not that a PG movie is the place to examine such practices). Which makes me wonder why Burton felt it necessary base his story on such an outlandishly fetishistic premise. Even the title, for chrissake, sounds like something in the backroom of sleazy, small-town video-stores.

By skirting the issues that were obviously the object of Burton and his cohorts’ desire, they don’t so much as simplify it (for younger audiences, no doubt) but dumb it down so much that it’s not a children’s film, rather than a film made with the mindset of a child. As its intended audience grows older, will they remember the fascination of its macabre tendencies with fondness? Most likely they will come to realize its absurdities, and move on to more fleshy films such as Rosemary’s Baby. Movies for kids don’t have to be so shallow, just remember the magic of films such as The Red Balloon – its wonder doesn’t float off like the balloon when one reaches adulthood. Burton’s just wasn’t thinking outside the sandbox.

Home is Where the Heat Is: Fritz Lang's The Big Heat

Roy Armes, in his book Film and Reality, has suggested that part of the appeal of the Western is its combination of familiar landscape and familiar story, and an ever-changing path to reach that common conclusion. With film noir, I would say there is a similar formula, but put the emphasis on an unfamiliar landscape: the path is never so interesting as when atmosphere invades and corrupts it. For example: the winter-wonderland On Deadly Ground. It is the tried-and-true story of the cop who is sick of criminals and falls for the sister of a murderer. Solving the case also means solving the mystery of his dissatisfaction: he needs love, and finds it in the sister…but in the middle of the woods? And during winter? Somehow, Nicholas Ray makes it work.

Such is the case with Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. It’s not a snow-day cop thriller, but rather a domesticated cop thriller. The lack of harsh shadows, dark alleys and prison symbolism seems mysteriously lacking, until one realizes that Lang has imposed all of the moral decay of film noir to the family home, much like Hitchcock did in Shadow of a Doubt. Except where Hitchcock used shadows to project prison-like bars onto his protagonists, Lang throws in a doll – and I’m not using noir lingo, either.

The story is basic: a cop becomes the target of highly influential crooks that run the local politics, as well as the police. But as the film progresses, the street-drama leaves the streets and invades the home. An innocent wife is mistakenly killed. To counter this, her brother and his buddies take up guns and follow the basic creed of “guilty until proven innocent.” It is exactly this moral divergence that fascinates Lang. As we feel ourselves becoming more vulnerable, what right do we have to strike back? Where are the boundaries between aggressive and defensive? Lang also poses the question as to whether this vulnerability is paranoia, or self-inflicted. Classic Lang that permeates the entirety of his output, from Dr. Mabuse to Fury to While the City Sleeps; he is very much a director whose visual style reflects his personal concerns.

From Fantasy to Terror: Tabu

Tabu (1931) is equal parts Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau: it’s two creators (even though Murnau received final directing credit). There is a transformation throughout the film, as the style shifts from the former director to the latter’s temperament; accompanying the stylistic change is an overall shift in the mood of the piece, and it is this “shift” that is the focus of the movie: how idyllic fantasy turns into guilt ridden nightmare. The images from the first half of the film reappear in the latter half, their contexts changed, the naivety corrupted. Tabu's imagery is one that continually develops throughout the course of the film, evolving as do the characters and the story.

The first part of the film is heavily Flaherty influenced, almost seeming like a remake of his 1925 film Moana. (In fact, the name of the ship is “Moana,” and there are other visual links, as well.) We are in the South Seas, on a tropical island that, like Nanook of the North and Moana, seems unaltered by time. For all we know, it is a pre-industrial time. When word arrives that one of the island’s women is to taken away and become a sacred virgin on a neighboring island. For her tribe, this is a cause for celebration; for her male lover, this means disaster. Should she not fulfill her ritual obligation, she will break the taboo and have to be killed.

When the two lovers escape to another island, there is an abrupt shift in the film. No longer the idyllic idealism of their home, the new port is bursting with the affects of modernity: economics and business, as well as integration. The land is filled with Chinese, English, and half-castes. In this new land, a whole different set of taboos develops and ensnares our protagonists.

Flaherty and Murnau were both concerned with the connections between moral catharsis and nature: Nosferatu is quelled by the morning sunrise, Nanook must continually fight weather and animals to survive, and even the lovers of Sunrise experience a rebirth after a near-drowning experience. In Tabu, one finds that economic and ritual taboos have even destroyed the hope of water’s renewal. The boyfriend goes to the water, first, to find pearls to sell in order to get he and his girlfriend out of debt; he returns to find she has left, returned with her father to finish the ritual. He then rows after their boat, jumping ship to latch on to a loose rope from their boat; while holding on, the father cuts the rope, and the boyfriend drowns.

Samurai Double Feature at Film Forum

Samurai Assassin (1965, Kihachi Okamoto). The last shot is worth all the suffering that the first, incoherent ninety minutes caused. Toshiro Mifune is limping off into the snowy fields, the only survivor after a bloody battle, carrying the Shogun's head on his sword. Unbeknownst to him, it is his father’s head, a father who had abandoned him at birth. The irony is Shakespearean: it is a tragedy, but also a comedy. As Mifune staggers, the narrator, speaking his last words before he, too, dies on the battlefield, announces that there were orders to burn all the records of Mifune fighting in that battle; the leaders had already planned the way it would be remembered in the future. The narrator, who was keeping records of the assassination of the Shogun, dies, and all his documents fall into a nearby stream. Even in changing history themselves, they have no control over how they will be remembered.

Zatoichi the Fugitive (1963, Tokuzo Tanaka) tells a story too complicated for its own good. What is important, however, is that the film’s imagery is very modest and tasteful. The tendencies are toward intimidation-focused encounters, silent and slow, rather than for self-depreciatingly unrealistic massacres as would be expected. The battles are there and, yes, they are riotous in their choreography as well as in humor, but more often than not, they are curtailed and given an unexpectedly early ending. These ends, however premature, are witty and provide the proper closure for such a character-based series. Here is one such set-up. There is an ambush, and Zatoichi must clash swords with a samurai. On the first encounter, Zatoichi retreats in anguish – his arm is cut. The samurai steps back, saying that they are even (getting Zatoichi back for one-upping him in public with a sword trick). Just then, the samurai puts his sword back and notices his arm, too, is cut. Zatoichi, once more, is one up.

Herzog's Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Everything about Werner Herzog’s work is extremely individualistic. As a director he is aggressive, thus his imprint is intrinsic. The world feels fresh and unique in a Werner Herzog film, sand seems as particular to him as it is, in actuality, common. There are few directors who can really make the world seem their own.

His protagonists, fictional or real, are just as individualistic, and Herzog prides himself (modestly, of course) on conveying their personal nature with as much authenticity as possible. He does not pass judgment, and when Herzog finds himself disagreeing with his subjects, he offers his objection as his own opinion, never imposing at as the core of his argument, never overshadowing his character, and never without having first conveyed the core of his characters.

There are no such disagreements in Little Dieter Needs to Fly; here, both filmmaker and subject are in complete accordance. Made in 1997, Little Dieter is a documentary on Dieter Dengler, a German pilot (on the American side) who was shot down over Laos on his first mission in 1965. It’s really a metaphysical film, about how one man’s passion and intensity came to motivate his survival after being taken captive, how hallucinations of his dreams and ancestors led him to freedom. It is a war story that is beyond politics.

Dieter exhibits the same determination as an Aguirre, a Fitzcaraldo, a Timothy Treadwell, though for a change obsession does not destroy the spirit; rather, it keeps the spirit alive in the most horrendous of circumstances: war, capture, torture, and rampant hopelessness. But the dream of flying always kept Dieter on the go, even after he escaped and was lost in the jungles for weeks on end. The dream finds roots in his childhood spent in Germany during WWII, of planes attacking his small town and swooping in front of his window. Already, the contradiction of fascination and horrification is apparent, as is the strength of a passion that overcomes fear.

Dieter’s greatest strength is his dream: to fly again. That a dream can be so determined as to provoke an unceasing optimism is nothing short of inspiring.

Fire and Sand Abound in Werner Herzog's "Lessons of Darkness"

Amidst the burning oil fields of Kuwait featured in Werner Herzog’s documentary Lessons of Darkness is a world turned mute: an environment that can no longer speak. Save for the constant musical score, there are almost no other sounds. The image is on mute, and Herzog keeps his narration to a minimum. Of the two interviews in the film, one of them is with a Kuwaiti woman who, after witnessing her children’s torture and murder, lost the ability to speak; the other is with a mother holding her child, who after being stepped on my soldiers spoke only once more to his mother: he told her that he never wanted to learn to speak.

This lack of speech is the central metaphor in the overall dehumanization that Herzog sees displayed in the aftermath of Desert Storm. It is a theme that permeates all aspects of the film in a natural, intrinsic manner. Even Herzog’s photography of the landscape, shooting from a moving helicopter, cannot belie the alien land it has become. It is impassable by even foot. The oil industry first began the land’s transformation; the bombs secured its beyond-this-world sense of ruin. The ignition of the oil, the final act of the Iraqi soldiers, was also the final act of abandonment.

Key, also, is how Herzog does not muddle the apocalyptic poetry of the images with political and historical double-speak. He blames no one and sides no one. The aftermath, the affected landscape, is what concerns Herzog, not the politicians’ justification for destruction. Everything seems to be beyond the scope of words; the human victims will not speak, all the while the land refuses the shut up: the oil keeps burning, keeps raining. It is both a regressive situation, returning the land to the earth, and one decidedly futuristic. The pools of oil reflect not their true self, but the skies above; oil drizzles down from the sky; the air is black with smoke and toxic fumes; and groups of men wearing facemasks and helmets drag in long hoses and heavy machinery. Not one element is in its place.

That Herzog is able to draw ties-that-bind through his historically eclectic body of work, ranging from conquistadors to Kuwait, only confirms his suspicion at the end of Lessons of Darkness: that man cannot live without the fires, and that we will always keep them burning steadily so we have something to extinguish.

Ingmar Bergman's The Silence

With every Ingmar Bergman film I watch, I inevitably do not understand the character motivations, but then again, I never question them, either. Every line the characters say seems to be the right thing; there is never any hesitation on their part. That is why watching a Bergman film is a physical experience for me, something completely visceral. My mind detects themes, but my gut takes all the punches, feels all the emotion, and that is where the real storytelling happens.

The Silence (1963) is one of those films that defies comprehension but is undeniable accurate. Its construction is so minimal that it almost resembles fantasy. There is a post-apocalyptic emptiness that pervades every scene, desperately realistic in its outlook. Looking out the window of a train, a boy sees only a parallel train carrying tanks into the city; when it has passed, the landscape is empty, so empty that it appears as though the train is hardly moving. Traveling with him are his mother and her sister, experiencing the last throws of a disparate relationship about to collapse. Their emotional destruction mirrors their destitute, hollow surroundings. Even the hotel they stay at is empty, save for a troupe of theatrical dwarfs and an elderly bellhop. By the end of their stay, the mother and sister say their final words; mother and son retreat back to the train, while the sister stays on in the hotel, living out her last days diseased and alone.

Bergman’s jump-off seems to be that even during wartime, we’re still capable of doing even greater damage to each other. The soul is what concerns Bergman, and when it seems to be the only vestige of humanity that war hasn’t stolen, the film portrays characters that are more interested in destroying it than preserving it. The philosophy is certainly pessimistic, but Bergman does end on a hopeful note, because the son seems to realize the cold-heartedness of his mother, and is beginning to resent it. So rather than giving up on life, Bergman shows both the capability of our moral collapse, as well as the seed of a new possibility.

"Ten Day Wonder" Two Hours Later...Still Wondering

Claude Chabrol’s Ten Days Wonder tries to replace mystery with ambiguity, and it never works the way he wants it to. Ambiguity isn’t so mysterious as it is deficient. Even though he co-wrote the first book on Hitchcock, he didn’t learn the most valuable lesson from Hitch, which is that audiences need information in order to be interested. Hitchcock’s method of audience engagement is based on desire, implication and guilt, all of which Chabrol worked into the psychological conception of his film but not into his directing, which is the ultimate flaw of Ten Days Wonder: the audience is left wondering what it was all about.

Structurally, the story is non-committal. The film changes focus with every plot twist, losing track of all the previous threads, some of which are never picked up and given closure at all. The opening scene, with Anthony Perkins hallucinating about jellyfish and realizing he is covered in his own blood, is the initial mystery of the film – why is he bleeding? jellyfish? – and it is never concluded. This turns into a mysterious absence of four days of which Perkins cannot recall anything. This, too, is forgotten once it serves its purpose and leads the film into a new direction.

This new direction is into an oedipal situation involving a rich, controlling father (Orson Welles), his young wife who has fallen in love with their adopted son (Perkins), and Perkins’ trusted teacher (Michel Piccoli) whom Perkins asked to figure out his loss of memory. Chabrol must suffer from the same sort of amnesia, because he never gets around to fulfilling the mysteries of the film’s first thirty minutes. Ultimately, the solution that Chabrol gives revolves around a Christian guilt complex induced by the Ten Commandments. It is a perfect textbook answer, but as all students come to realize, textbooks are more rational than people are. Our neuroses are never that clear-cut, and their answers are never that satisfying, thus neither is Chabrol’s closure to Ten Days Wonder.

My First Encounter With Louise Brooks

It was a mistake to make a movie with Louise Brooks: she was too beautiful for it ever to work. In Pandora’s Box director G.W. Pabst films her in such a way that puts her on an entirely different level from the rest of the cast. She acts with the camera, never with the other actors. Her features are too striking, too distinctively iconographic – with her pageboy hair, helmet-like in its stillness, she was made to be statuesque – for her to exist on the narrative level; she transcends it onto the plain of mythology (in the way that Barthes describes Garbo’s face as mythological).

Pabst’s name is inseparable from his star Brooks because she is the real art of his films; he put all of his effort into making her an immortal presence on screen. The plot of the film isn’t worth the bother. It is nonsensical on screen, and I do not wish to indulge in paragraphs of ridicule the way Andrew Sarris often does – I get his point quickly and skim until he gets back to his job: criticism.

The other problem with the film is that Pabst is neither Muranu nor Lang, his two major contemporaries at UFA in the late 1920s, and he also seems to be caught in the middle of their styles. Pabst can neither pull off the almost exclusively image based films of Murnau (with only one or two title-cards) or the elegant scripts of Lang. Thus, Pandora’s Box has minimal titles, but weak ones at that, and they are never up to their task. His usual long-shots do not convey much information, and when title-cards are intercut, it is up for grabs as to whose lines they are. If it weren’t for Louise Brooks, there wouldn’t be any faces to remember after the film ends. Then again, if she weren’t in the film, perhaps the other actors wouldn’t have been eclipsed and forgotten so easily.

Blowing the Lid off "American Pop"

Right at the core of American Pop’s problems is its uneven writing. It’s premise is weak – all of twentieth century America shown through a family of musicians in 96 minutes, and all done through animation – but writer Ronni Kern gives up on it halfway through the movie. The first half of the movie covers 1900-1950, roughly, in a fleeting, disconnected manner. Then, settling into the 60s and 70s, periods from the Kern and director Ralph Bakshi’s own lifetime, the film begins to lag. The entire second half is dedicated to drugged-out, insipidly surreal Rock and Roll hallucinations; in those twenty years, history seems to have stopped, save for a brief interlude of a few bombs dropping in Vietnam.

But there are deeper problems with the film, as well, especially it’s attempted portrayal of history. Both World Wars and Vietnam are handled in a similar manner; archival footage is crosscut with animated sequences of dancing and music. This dialectic is immature in design, and falsely implicational in meaning. It is no secret that Europe and Asia was ravaged throughout the twentieth century through wars that America was involved in. More than just mere involvement, though, America is to blame for many atrocities. (Hiroshima and Nakasaki are never mentioned in American Pop, by the way.) If the dialectic went no further than this, it could be written off as sophomoric. But what it really does is navigate around America’s own history book and replace it with shallow images of more global conflicts. The Atom Bomb, the Great Depression, Civil Rights, Women’s Suffrage – the list goes on – none of them were even hinted at in the film.

Essentially, Kern and Bakshi have reduced everything to the stereotype or the cliché. When one character wanders around 1970’s Harlem looking for drugs, the only scenery is a couple Superfly’d dealers in red fur. The ghetto doesn’t exist, and neither does poverty or racism. Actually, yes they do, but only as regards White Russians. The stars of the film fled a pogrom in Russia, only to come to America impoverished and without work. They also lead jazz bands backed by black musicians. The more proper title for this film would be America Russian Style.

Werner Herzog: The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Kept in a basement well into his adult years, Kaspar Hauser never learned to communicate - he never met another soul save for his keeper. Unexpectedly released one day, Hauser is introduced into a village that does not know him. Over the next few years, Hauser learns to speak, to think, and engages in society in a totally unexpected and original manner. Not taught to accept, he naturally questions, and Hauser is immediately a controversial figure.

Watching Werner Herzog's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, I kept thinking about the way that society tried to pin him down. They wrote him off as a potential criminal, a lunatic, a could-be threat, an idiot, an overgrown child – all because he remained to them an enigma, something that couldn’t be pinned down with words and classifications, and that scared them. Kept in that basement for years with bread, water, and a toy horse, Hauser had nothing to question for he knew no else; even the difference between an empty cup and one filled he does not learn until he is abandoned/liberated. Between abandonment and liberation there is no difference, for they serve the same purpose to Hauser: self-reliance. Confronted with the never-ending possibilities of life, Hauser begins to learn unaffectedly. His logic is his own, as it should be; his rationale doesn’t fit with the intelligentsia.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is Werner Herzog’s declaration of non-conformity. Even though Hauser’s attire changes through the film, he always resists the uniform; resists the definition; resists accuracy. As Herzog said in his latest project Grizzly Man, “The natural order of the world is chaos.”

-Cullen Gallagher

Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore

Every shot in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore is replete with onlookers; their gaze is apathetic and bored. They watch everyone, waiting for someone to begin their job, for within the symbiotic machine of movie making, one cannot do their job unless someone else is pulling their end; yet no one seems to be able to start work. This perpetuating indecision finds its genesis with the director, played by Lou Castel, who refuses to direct those who cannot work without direction. Ideally, our actions are to be executed independent from others. Fassbinder’s characters cannot live up to this, their own fantasy concocted to protect them from committing fully to a relationship; they discover that in any relationship there isn’t a balance of power: the scale is always a variable skew.

Fassbinder’s preoccupation with pestilent relationships has been extrapolated here, and it seems as relevant to business as it does to personal relationships. But Fassbinder has always been interested in the relationship of love and money – there is always a logical side to relationships to balance the illogic of passion and whim. With production halted, the movie’s set, a regal palace, is turned into a stagnant oasis. Castel sits at the bar drinking his night away, prolonging any decision as long as he can. Finishing his drink, he smashes the glass and says (something to the effect of), “If I don’t have glasses to smash, life isn’t worth living.” Combustion needs fuel; creative temperament needs an outlet and artists, for Fassbinder at least, may be brilliant, but they are destructive as well.

The ensemble casting has always been a favorite of Fassbinder, who likes to work with microcosmic societies. Aside from Castel, there is Hannah Shygulla, French actor Eddie Constantine, Fassbinder himself, and a handful of colorful actors that might ring a bell from the hoards of other Fassbinder movies out there. But with so many people and so many relationships, Fassbinder avoids possible saturation (and didacticism) and bleeds these themes evenly over all the characters: no one is wasted.

TCM Classics: Ride the High Country

The Western genre, with its roots in the changing landscape of the American west, is the perfect allegory for history’s pervading tempest. Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) picks two old-timers caught on the cusp of change: Joel McCrea, the moralistic loser searching for pride, and Randolph Scott, the side-show gunslinger who’s self worth is as empty as his pockets. McCrea hires Scott and his young cohort to transport gold from the mine to town, while Scott has plans of converting his old friend and running off with the gold. It’s a story of camaraderie, fading glory, missed opportunities, and the disillusionment of living to see your youth wither and amount to nothing. The themes are the same as Peckinpah’s later film The Wild Bunch (1969), but neither film seems to stepping on each other’s toes. Whereas Ride the High Country adds to the mix a young buck, nervy cowboy out to sow his oats, making Peckinpah’s story multi-generational, The Wild Bunch lets the cowboys die off; there are no inheritors, and nothing to inherit.

More than the birth of a new society, Ride the High Country is about the death of an aging one. Modernization is equated with the depersonalization of the West, and the dismantling of a community founded on your self-worth. You are only as big as your name, and there’s no room to rest on your laurels; this extends beyond gun slinging and bank-robbing and into less glamorous territories such as friendship and trust. But Peckinpah makes it seem less cheesy than that. His narrative style is, by this point, well oiled. As Andrew Sarris points out, the film lacks the infinite supply of bullets of so many Westerns, as well as other mythologies so readily accepted. Instead, this film strives for a less romantic realism, mixed with a less saturated vision of violence that would become Peckinpah in only a few more years. In retrospect, one can already feel the Western genre begin to feel its age; it doesn’t slow down, and Ride the High Country is perhaps a peak in the genre, but like the characters that Scott and McCrea portray, they realize they are in a changing society that will never go back to the way it once was.

At the Walter Reade... Allegro Non Troppo

Bruno Bozzetto’s Allegro Non Troppo is more Fellini than Disney. If the intent was to pay homage to Fantasia, so be it, but Allegro surpasses the original in every way. Where Disney's characters are often naïve and classical, Bozzetto’s are perverse and iconoclastic. In one segment, Bozzetto indulges in Bosch to portray a satyr chasing women; if it were a Disney film, the man would be lonely and looking for a platonic mate; Bozzetto portrays the satyr as an old lecher out to rape a young fairy maiden. The film is amoral, something Disney has never understood. To them, a film is a lesson to be taught. Not so for Bozzetto. To hit the point home, Bozzetto dedicates an entire sequence to a man whom everyone copies. The search for identity turns to a fascistic control. Just when our Benito-to-be thinks he has full control, his “army” surprises him: they turn and drop their pants. Morality really makes an ass out of a movie.

Also: but for a few intelligible yammers (a very few that are quite forgivable) there are no talking animals.

In Memory of Tonino Delli Colli

Tonino Delli Colli, the magnificent cinematographer, passed away August 17th. He was 83.

He worked closely with some of the world's greatest directors. He photographed almost all of Pasolini's movies, starting with Accatone right up through Pasolini's final film, Salo. He worked with Sergio Leone on both The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, as well as Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America, with Louis Malle on his short William Wilson and Lacombe, Lucien, Fellini on Intervista and The Voice of the Moon, and with Roberto Benigni on Life is Beautiful, Tonino's final film.

Recent Watching: Lady in the Lake

Lady in the Lake was an attempt to make a first-person film, to accurately convey through film the experience of reading Raymond Chandler’s book of the same name, where the reader encounters everything through Phillip Marlowe rather than just reading about him. In literature, this means that that “he said” is replaced by “I said,” and that it is a little more difficult (and out of place) to have scenes occur where the main character isn’t around. It is much more difficult to transpose onto film. The camera must be the main character, thus Marlowe isn’t so much a face than a voice, except when the camera passes in front of a mirror and there has to be a body there to be reflected (a camera’s reflection certainly wouldn’t do!).

Since the camera is Marlowe’s eyes, it can’t cut back and forth, or cut out time through ellipses – scenes must be played out in real time. Director/star Robert Montgomery does a good job of handling such a narrative technique, one that is more precocious than tried-and-true. The best scenes are the ones that are the most complicated in terms of staging and directing. It is not that they are merely flashy, but that they fully realize the potential and difficulty of the first-person camera.

The use of mirrors, particularly, requires quick, subtle editing. The use of a real mirror would reflect the camera, so while the camera pans from a girl, for example, to a mirror, there must be a cut while the girl and Marlowe step inside an empty mirror frame. While the camera pans away from the mirror, another cut must be made, as well. If the editing seems a bit obvious nowadays, it doesn’t deter one bit from either the story of the effects they were reaching for. More than forgivable, it is admirable.

The downside to the film is the stagy acting. Since the actors are acting with a camera, rather than an actor, there is an inherent monologue quality, as though they were reciting lines rather than performing a scene with other actors. As an aside, characters in film noir never seem too sincere, but in this film I feel it is even more drastic and noticeable. One scene in particular is so hammy that you could cut it, if the knife were sharp enough: the bad cop is about to shoot his girlfriend who is wanted for murder. She throws up her limbs and strikes the pose; he shoots; her arms mechanically jitter back and forth like a robot; finally, after a fittingly tragedian death, she stops moving, but not before tragedy turns into farce.

Something I didn’t mention before is the music. It is quite uncommon for its time both for its sparseness, and because it is primarily choral. The subdued and atmospheric quality of the singing is ethereally creepy, and separates it from the melodramatic symphonic scores that dominated films of that era.

-Cullen Gallagher

Recent Watching: Crossfire

Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire is definitely a subversive film, but I can’t tell to what? By telling the story of an anti-Semitic sergeant who murders an innocent vet because of his Jewish heritage, is he exposing the sordid sides to our military? Or, by emphasizing the military’s quick reflexes in bringing a falsely accused soldier to innocence and bringing justice to the guilty party, is Dmytryk only adding fuel to the military’s propaganda bonfire?

***

Robert Ryan is clearly the highpoint of the film. Violence, for Ryan, isn’t an outward emotion, it is something inward that is projected, it has to come through your eyebrows and your elbows, not just your fists and your words. His face is unsettlingly calm, his limbs almost mechanical, and his composure sure and unrevealing: the epitome of militaristic professionalism. His perfection exudes the façade it seeks to hide. Never given the opportunity to be the hero, Ryan was able to perfect the role of “villain” even when the scripts were deficient (as in Crossfire). He doesn’t rest on dialogue and screen-direction, he makes acting something deeply personal, in the process wresting the character from the writer/director, and making it truly a creation of the actor. For this reason, many of Ryan’s character exhibit certain similarities; needless to say, they are always well acted, and always make the films a worthwhile venture.

-Cullen Gallagher

Recent Watching: Me and You and Everyone We Know

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)
Written and Directed by Miranda July

With all the stories going around about the new IFC Theater’s labor disputes (they refused to hire union projectionists), I expected it to be another corporate Turkish bath, with large ladles of butter waxing me anesthetized while scuttling quarters out of my pocket. On the contrary, it was one of the most pleasant excursions to the theater I’ve had in years, and the large, blue cushions – these aren’t chairs, mind you – make you wish Loews used their money for furniture rather than a fifth concession stand.

For the record, the IFC Theater has only one concession stand, and it is rather small. But, they still do charge three bills for that small drink.

You know, I really walked out of that theater optimistic for the future of the movie-theater, because it was the first time I had a taste of what it would have been like to see a movie thirty years ago: there were two unannounced shorts before the feature. So unannounced that both times I thought they were the start of the movie I bought a ticket to, Me and You and Everyone We Know. And what good opening scenes they would have been.

The first was an animated short was called Garden of Delights, and was made by Jeff Scher. The drawings are so archaic, so primitive that they look like sketches strewn together to form a demo for a later project. Flashing on the screen are inconsistencies in the background, a British flag, a stamp, or a newspaper clipping, while the main action plays out smoothly. The deliberate roughness of the animation is refreshing when compared to the CGI gloss of so many mainstream animated features, and it allows you focus more clearly on the impressionistic kinesis of the images.

When John C. Reilly appeared on a street corner, filmed in black and white, I immediately thought this was the opening scene of Miranda July’s film. Actually, it was a short film she wrote (which was directed by Miguel Arteta). Reilly is conducting a survey; he wants to know, Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody (also the title of the film)? First, a woman is pretty sure she is. Second, a man is ultimately positive that he is not. Reilly, perhaps out of pity, offers the man an orange. Mr. Unloved takes one and asks for two? His wife would like one. Then, he asks for three – perhaps not for anyone in particular, but just because he’s wandered upon a good deal. Unloved as though he may be (but still in a relationship on good enough terms to share fruit), he seems optimistic and unconcerned with the present. Either he doesn’t care that he isn’t anyone’s favorite person; more likely, he is beyond such confidence issues.

It is interesting that July wrote such a character, as the ones in her feature length, directorial debut Me and You and Everyone We Know, are anything but assured about the future. They are unsatisfied with the present and unsure about the future. They seem to share a particular neuroses with characters found in Woody Allen’s films – they are a tad compulsive, somewhat anti-social and irreversibly neurotic, and this is where their charm comes from.

Whereas Allen’s characters are often caught in a never-ending present tense (never able to foresee the future) and haunted by the past, July’s characters are like subjunctive verbs. They are always looking at the future, both doubtful of what will come, but hopeful that something good may come along too; they are never aware of the present. This is best described in Sylvie, a pre-teen who is preoccupied with creating her dowry. She fills it with kitchen utensils bought under the presumption that they will not go out of style in twenty years.

The rest of the story is blanket-like: it fits nicely in your lap, but its impossible to count all the threads. Like Magnolia, it is a collection of characters whose lives intermix fleetingly, yet they all affect one another. I will mention two characters in particular, Richard, a recently separated father who works as a shoe salesman, and Christine, a cabbie for the elderly/artist seeking exhibition/wandering young maiden looking for love.

While the acting is very good, the zealous direction from July can undermine the understated performances. Example: after a jokingly unemotional, purely aesthetic discussion on art and digital media, July cuts to a young boy staring at a computer. There is a screensaver of the universe, of planets slowly turning. It is a totally unaesthetic, energy saving device, but the boy experiences so much emotion through it. The scenes form a telling dialectic, but the irony overkills the point.

Another scene finds Christine on her way to find Richard at the shoe-store, but he is speaking to his wife (they are separated). From across the store, however, it looks as though they are lovers, and Christine jumps to conclusions and tries to sell the wife a talking picture frame (it says “I love you”) before leaving the store. Cut to her in a car repeating, “Fuck” this or that. She then scribbles, “fuck,” on the inside of her windshield.

Her directing is overly emphatic, and often it exaggerates the otherwise meaningful expressions within the film.

Related to this is the permeating search for something profound. The typical ending to scenes is a slow zoom-out while the characters stare at the camera: a moment of silence that, like the directing, drives home a point so hard that it breaks through the back of the garage and runs over the dog. July should be more content with her characters’ discontentedness; profundity rarely accompanies overstatement, as her film shows.

During the film, these quirks bothered me much more so than now (a visit to the IFC bathroom, complete with a moat-like basin to collect the water from the faucet, certainly excited me, as well). But I think the main reason that I can’t seem to dwell on the faults is the last scene, a perfect example of the unexpected charm and cuddle-awe Me and You can offer.

Richard, preparing the house for a visit from Christine, tries to dispose of a framed picture of a bird by throwing it in some bushes. Christine arrives and cheerfully suggests trying a different bush. They both agree that it doesn’t work there either (these “games” can either be drudgery or uplifting – here, I find them the latter). Then Christine sees a tree across the yard. The painting fits, and they decide to leave it there. The final shot is a fade-out of the painted bird with the real branch in front of it. Reality has breeched the art. Even if the message of the shot makes you wince, the way it describes the preceding scene seems justly fitting.

-Cullen Gallagher

Have you heard it?

Cineholla has heard the holla of the wild.

Certain essays have been removed for the moment and are being re-written. Expect them back soon. Expect more in the future - I will make the effort to keep up with what I have seen, rather than picking and choosing as I do now.

-'holla

Recent Watching: Lost Lost Lost

Lost Lost Lost (1973)
Directed by Jonas Mekas

Watching Jonas Mekas' three-hour, home-movie epic Lost Lost Lost (1973), I was confounded. I didn't enjoy watching it at all, but I do think there is an undeniable depth to the film that makes it important. The footage spans fifteen years, from 1949 through 1963, as Mekas and his brother Adolphas move into their first apartment in Brooklyn. They are Lithuanians living in exile, so says Jonas in the narration, in exile because they have no roots. This film, then, is about making those roots, finding companions, entering communities, and becoming familiar with your land.

Its historical aspects are the most memorable: Williamsburg in 1949, with its multi-story strata of clotheslines and dirty sheets; Times Square in the early 50s, with recording booths where you can put your voice on vinyl, political activists pushing disarmament (the slogan was, “USA USSR BOTH SIDES WRONG”); an early 50’s Stonybrook picnic, as banal a scene as ever that could be anywhere; an elevator needle indicating which floor it is on. For the most part, the footage is of people living their life.

The latter half of the film concentrates less on activity and environment and more on a camera’s mobility. Repeated, jerky zooms (in and out, in and out) and figure 8s (as well as footage of the cameraman doing those figure 8s) are now the focus of the film, and they go on for almost an hour. Avant-garde movies have the intrinsic disadvantage that most of them, at some point, cease to be revolutionary and settle into oddity.

What Mekas seems to be doing is shoving in our faces something both extremely familiar yet drastically unfamiliar. These images are of our lives, the commonest moments in the most likely of places. We sit, we stare (this is, of course, forgetting about those moments in Mekas’ film where a couple imitates Tarzan and Jane, though I’m sure some people do that to) – there is nothing extraordinary about what is in these images. So why do we feel so bored and lost in these images? We know the context, yet the fact that they belong to someone else makes them seem foreign. Not that I think Mekas has a solution, or even a discernable problem that needs fixing, but I do think that he has tapped into a natural paradox in our lives.

Mekas touches on this during one of his narrations. He says that the audience wants him to provide abstractions, but that he won’t give in. Abstractions, for Mekas, are names, jobs, ethics, and morals; in lieu of all that, he provides a face, an attitude, and a place. One can almost sense some of the Beat mentality (as regards middle-class conventions) coming out, and it wouldn’t be that far fetched, as Allen Ginsburg, LeRoi Jones and Frank O’Hara pop up in some of the footage.

The weakest part of Mekas’ film is that it does drag on, but I’d be pressed to say, “cut here” or “take this segment out.” Any of the footage seems as important to the film as the rest, any just as replaceable. Ideally, the form should be equally important to the content: they should be appropriate towards, as well as dictate, one another. The greatest of films find that the two are inseparable, and that it would be foolish to discuss them as separate parts. That no particular scenes dictate the message of the movie implies that it is the form the film takes – the home-movie – is most important.

-Cullen Gallagher

Obit: Barbara Bel Geddes

To those who have not already heard, Barbara Bel Geddes passed away last week due to lung cancer.

Recent Watching: Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier (1971)
by Winterfilm Collective

One doesn’t watch Winter Soldier; primarily, one listens. But, there is also that languid, searching stare that can only come when one has truly stopped watching and have begun to pay attention.

In 1971, a group of Vietnam veterans were seated in a Howard Johnson’s in Detroit for a landmark public confession of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Some of the soldiers spoke of war crimes they had seen committed, others of crimes they had committed themselves. All their stories had one thing in common, however: the unspoken acceptance of these horrors that had, up until then, gone unchallenged. Their stories lose impact when they are transcribed in words, especially the prose of a young man like myself who has never had to live through such times. Without the footage of their unflinching faces recollecting these atrocities, remembering stories spontaneously – even more brutal is how they were desensitized to where they could actually forget…without these, Winter Soldier does not exist.

Winterfilm Collective, the group behind Winter Soldier, has essentially created an anti-movie. It was the anti-thesis of everything cinema had evolved to. The semblance of a master creator (an auteur) was completely gone: no narration, no imposed ideology, no interviewer; even the camera lacked a presence. The shots were empty of technique, and existed only to capture the faces of those who spoke. Some shots would go on for several minutes, never adjusting even the focus, as a soldier broke the bond of silence and told the story of what was really going on in Vietnam. This un-interrupting camera is the pinnacle of non-judgmental trust.

In a recent interview with the filmmakers, someone blurted out that the black-and-white film stock used had been given to them for free since it had expired. It wasn’t so much an apology for the grainy look, but one of those providential stories about low-budget films that are so fecund in the field. Another blurted out that the film was never intended to be shown in a theater – it was supped to be a traveling film for the veterans for when they spoke. Even that would be contested by some of the filmmakers – they looked at it not so much as a project, but as a social duty, to be there when these people said something that had never been said before.

The lack of formalistic gloss in Winter Soldier makes for a non-analytical experience that is simple in its goal – to listen – and penetrating with its results. The film accomplishes technically what it set out to do – to record these testimonies and let the veterans speak for themselves. Never once do you get the feeling that the filmmakers are in control of what is being said; that they are never felt can only be attributed to the natural state of submission and awe that overcomes spectators when there is truly something worthwhile to be listening to.

-Cullen Gallagher

More on Jun Ichikawa

http://www.fipresci.org/festivals/archive/2004/locarno/locarno2004_brdeckova.htm

Here is a short review of Tony Takitani by Tereza Brdeckova. Its short size decieves the eye at first, for there certainly is a depth of understanding to this piece. Good, concise writing. A reccomended read (as well as watch, if you can find the film).

-'Holla

Notes: Knock on Any Door

I just finished watching Nicholas Ray's Knock on Any Door, which featured Humphrey Bogart in the lead as a lawyer defending a young boy from the slums accused of shooting a cop. Typical of Ray's work, the film takes the stance that context is responsible for action: society dictates who is good and who is bad. Both Bogart's character and the young boy remind me of older and younger versions of other Ray protagonists: Farley Granger in They Live by Night, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, Robert Mitchum in The Lusty Men. They all share a common fate, one they had no choice over. Their tough guy lifestyles were the result of survival, not of an inherent nature.

Ray's last shot is so telling of the forces behind the characters, of the moral constructs that alienate people into disparate situations, elevate some to great heights, and abandon others to desolate lives. After the young boy has confessed to murdering the cop he is sentenced to death. It is a long shot, with Bogart standing in the foreground off to the side, and with the words THE END superimposed over the single, long take. The boy is center frame, being led down a jail corridor to an open door at the end, where he is to be executed. In the open door is a bright light, something that escapes the exposure of the camera. The bring light at the end of the tunnel uses the same iconography so often associated with heaven. Ray's visual connection highlights the presence of morality that lies behind the situation: hypocrisy and judgment, antipathy and abandonment. Ray's final visual critique, much like Bogart's final statement, is a denouement of contemporary morays, and a call for a reassessment of our values.

In Memory of...

In the past week three important film figures have passed on.

1) Ernest Lehman, another screenwriter who collaborated with Hitchcock on films such as North by Northwest and Family Plot.

2) Italian film director Alberto Lattuada, who's most famous film was his collaboration with Fellni, Variety Lights.

3) Evan Hunter, screenwriter who most famously collaborated on The Birds with Alfred Hitchcock.

Essay: Walkabout

Walkabout (1971)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg

"Symbols and Trophies of the West"
by Cullen Gallagher

Nicolas Roeg opens his film Walkabout (1971) with a father doing field research in the Australian outback, with his son playing with toy cars and guns, and his daughter preparing a picnic. The father seemingly goes mad and begins shooting at his children before setting fire to the car and shooting himself. The children, sans parents and sufficient food, are left to wander the outback alone. While this is certainly a surreal way to open a movie, it can be analyzed in a very symbolic way, which ties it in well with the rest of the movie. If we dehumanize and objectify the father, making him an object, like the gun in his hand, or the car that he drives, his absence from the children’s lives takes on the significance of other Western signs absent from the majority of the movie.

On a broad symbolic level, the sudden change of character for the father can be seen as a mechanic malfunction, something akin to a car dying or a gun jamming. In essence, the opening scene symbolizes the backfiring of Western civilization and introduces the idea of societal discontentedness. The opening picnic then is a collection of Western comforts, things that have been given value and deemed necessity: bottled lemonade (not even water), a packed lunch, a blanket to spread the food on, a vehicle to travel with, a gun for protection – from what it is unclear, as there is nothing dangerous in these surrounds lest each other and their own inability to survive with luxuries.

Therefore the disrobing of Western civilization, so to speak, is necessary is in film’s narrative for the son and daughter to leave behind in order that they become, superficially, on the level of the aborigine they are to encounter. In opposition of such films as The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) (where a !Kung tribe is thrown for a loop when they mistake a Coca-Cola bottle as a present from the gods), it is not “the uncivilized man” that cannot make sense of “the civilized world” but vice versa: the “civilized” man is stripped of all that is familiar to him and he must adapt quickly to survival on his own.

Roeg also uses dialectics to compare the landscapes of the two different words: modern city life and the outback. Roeg begins the film with a shot of an apartment building near the sea. It is a picturesque shot, one that explains the place of nature in modern times: a scenic view from a window. The framing of the shot is important, however: the edge of the apartment building is flush alongside the right edge of the screen, occupying only a quarter of the screen. The remaining seventy-five percent of the screen is the ocean, which collides into and off of the left-hand side of the screen.

This shot is juxtaposed with a tracking shot that begins in a similar fashion to the previously discusses shot. A concrete wall begins on the left side of the screen, taking the place of the sea; frame right, the remaining quarter of the frame is an open shot of desert. The camera dollys right, exchanging the wall for a glimpse of the father in his car, doing research.

These two shots are important because of their visual similarities and their implications, which are very ironic. The portrait of modernity is distinguished by the presence of the sea, and the outback is introduced through a barren wall, seemingly pointless and lost in the terrain. But these characteristics are important, however. The sea is very tame next to the apartment building, it is not ferocious or wild; it appears as though it were a painting. One can imagine the inhabitants looking out their window the way they would look in the mirror or at an open closet. Contrarily, the wall is out of place in the outback, abandoned and solitary, much like the children feel at first. The two shots, then, summarize the typical interaction of the two worlds: they co-exist in such close proximity, yet they are separate and segregated.

Roeg embraces these incongruous neighbors; he destabilizes their isolation by presenting them together, in their greater contexts. Marshall McLuhan, in the book The Medium is the Massage (visualized by Quentin Fiore), addresses this notion of isolation as having vanished in contemporary society. Technology perpetuates knowledge. Print, paint and photography have plasticized knowledge, making it traversable, and the idea of truth can no longer seen as two sided: the “other” side of the story has given way to a whole circle of new truths, all equally viable (68-69). “Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view – the witless repetitive response to the unperceived” (10).

The environment McLuhan speaks of can be compared to the opening juxtapositions (and subsequent ones) in Walkabout. The dolly shot of the desert that begins with the wall on the left of the screen, and the small portion on the right with the desert. The camera tracks to the right, exchanging the wall for a larger view of the desert. These perspectives are changing, and these images (that represent places, ideas, people) are not static and separate – they form a greater whole, and they must be placed in a constantly evolving perspective. To quote Marshall McLuhan once more:

Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories – for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result. (McLuhan and Fiore 10)

Works Cited
McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. New York, London and Toronto: Bantam Books, 1967.

Editorial: A Revisionist Consideration of the Studio System

My brother proposed to me something initially frightening: “In thirty years are we going to actually think that these mediocre Hollywood films are great the way we think 50’s Hollywood films are?” I immediately compared In Good Company to something like On Dangerous Ground. On one hand, it’s not a fair comparison, because the latter film had veteran director Nick Ray (compared to the newbie camp of Paul Weitz), as well Robert Ryan in the lead, an actor that is underappreciated these days, and one whom I can think of no contemporary comparison - the only thing that comes to mind is that Ryan is the actor Al Pacino wants to be: handsome yet brutal in all his beauty, with a calm, intense composure, a sort of internal combustion. Even the stories are incomparable. The former film is a story of cheap ironies: a young exec falling for the daughter of the older executive he is about to replace. The latter film is a story of moral and ethical collapse: a police officer resorts to brutal interrogation methods when both crime and bureaucracy prove too much. To cool down, he is sent to a small, northern town to investigate a child murder, where he ends up falling in love with the murderer’s blind sister. Here, too, there is irony, but it is not so cheap as in its current-Hollywood comparison, rather it is used to explore conceptions of piety and pity in the hardened-heart of Robert Ryan.

The main reason for comparison is that On Dangerous Ground was by no means the best film of its year (Strangers on a Train, The River, A Place in the Sun, Ace in the Hole and A Streetcar Named Desire all came out in 1951), but is there any Hollywood as strong as it from 2004? (This does not even take into account the sheer number of solid movies produced by major studios in 1951.) The answer is: no. In Good Company is both the average and the best Hollywood can offer.

To answer my brother’s question: no, I don’t think in thirty years I will change my opinion. This raises another oft-discussed question: what happened to Hollywood? I believe that Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the massage” has something valuable to offer in that it emphasizes the notion of relaxation and passivity. McLuhan argued that different mediums (print, photography, cinema, telephone, etc) have affect the way we communicate, and that advances in technology accustom us to certain conveniences that affect our day-to-day interaction with other people. His argument about medium can be expanded to criterion, as well: audiences become accustomed to a certain type of movie, and if diversity isn’t pursued then a steady level of mediocrity perpetuates and quality declines.

Allow me now to illustrate this former hypothesis through revisionist historicism that deals with the studio system. Before its breakup in the early 1950s (a government decision against monopolies in 1948), the studios had it made: they owned not only the production means, but also the theaters that would distribute them. This vertical integration assured studios that their was an outlet for all their pictures, regardless of whether audiences liked them or not (or whether the studios thought they were sellable or not). It was an assured market: audiences always went to the movies as there was no television, and even if they went to see an ‘A’ film, there would always be that ‘B’ film before the feature.

The breakup of the studio system is the separation between studio and theater: companies like MGM and Warner stuck with making movies, while Loews stayed with the theaters. With the assured distribution of their movies rendered unsure, studios were left without the guarantee that theaters would purchase their movies. The result, as I see it, is that studios had to find some way to guarantee exposure and profit, the easiest way being to always appeal to the audience’s taste. Being the manufacturers that they were, Hollywood began pouring more money into similar movies, making them “bigger” and “better” than its last reincarnation, in hopes that audiences wouldn’t mind seeing the same thing over an over again. In the wake of this “economical genius” (that proved more deadening than anything) was the dissolution of the multitudes of films a studio would make.

Studios were pouring their money into films with lavish effects, huge action, childish humor and garish sexuality (bordering on the ethics, more so than the visuals, of pornography) in order to appeal to the widest demographics. There was no longer room for the adventurous producer, and with the costs of films rising incessantly, they found themselves in a money trap: audiences had become accustomed to movies with large budgets and found themselves uncomfortable with minimal production. Only films with large budgets would draw in crowds, money begets money, and thus the budgets of films began increasing (and still are to this day).

If I have left out the criterion of films, it is because such artistic attributes have no place in contemporary Hollywood studios: sophisticated writing alienates audiences that have been desensitized to degraded writing. Camera direction that does not pander to fulfilling the quick-to-cum fantasies of the audience is unfashionable.

Television, home video, and now the Internet have made the popular cinema more unstable than ever, not that such mediums are in anyway “evil” or responsible for the degrading of the Hollywood studios. Rather, it is that the studios lost their nerve. This is perhaps the result of the separation of the role of producer and director, the division between art and economy (not that the two are innately opposites). Perhaps Jean Renoir had the right solution back in the 1950s when he, too, saw the rising budgets of Hollywood studio films (where he made The River in 1951) as disastrous for the freedom of filmmakers. He suggested that the only solution is to lower the budgets: with less money spent, there is less pressure to make it back (and less to make back, at that). Only then can the studios begin to produce quality material without the fear of going bankrupt.

But how will audiences respond to such a change? Have their sensibilities become so accustomed to pornographic proportions that subtlety is no longer acceptable? Or, hopefully, it is to movie-going that they have become accustomed to, and that after a while, they will accept anything.

-Cullen Gallagher

Essay: An Autumn Afternoon

An Autumn Afternoon(1962)
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu

"Chance and Fare in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon"
by Cullen Gallagher

When Yasujiro Ozu made his final film, An Autumn Afternoon, 1962, it was not the first time he had approached its subject matter. Late Spring (1949) and Late Autumn (1960) all deal with a daughter’s reluctance to marry, and her single parent’s (father in Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon, mother in Late Autumn) unselfish decision to get them to marry. The bond between parent and daughter in these films is one of immeasurable strength, and the parent’s decision to help arrange the marriage is arrived at with great difficulty. They do not want their children to leave them, and they do so only in knowing that if their children stayed with them, they would miss the opportunity to lead a full life, and end up staying forever and, inevitably, being lonely. Ozu has explored such bonds between children and their parents in countless films, including Passing Fancy, Early Spring and Equinox Flower (which also deals with a daughter’s marriage, this time against her father’s will.) Any consideration of other aspects of An Autumn Afternoon would undoubtedly appear in many other films. Clearly, there is a repetition throughout Ozu’s oeuvre.

Any amount of predictability in his films is limited to certain situations, emotions, and the inevitable conclusion of loneliness. As Paul Schrader pointed out, “it’s roots [do] not stem from a lack of initiative or originality, as it does in the films of some directors, but rather from the primitive concept of ritual in which repetition is preferred to variety (Schrader 22).” Repetition is key to Ozu’s films. Kathe Geist reminds us that “his frequent uses of repetition...do not ‘impose their will’ on Ozu’s plots: they are his plots (Geist 94).” It is this, the formulation of plot from motif, which distinguishes each Ozu film from the others, regardless of story, character, or conclusion similarities.

An Autumn Afternoon develops from a motif of chance and fate, two seemingly oppositional characteristics. One reason for this juxtaposition is that, “in Ozu’s mind Japanese life had resolved into certain opposing forces which he repeatedly demonstrated in his films (Schrader 19).” This opposition will become the driving force of the father’s dilemma of his daughter’s marriage. A better reason, perhaps, is that by examining both ends of the spectrum Ozu is able to represent the gamut of our indecision.

The use of chance and fate in the film can be broken down into four main categories. Firstly, as a narrative function used in the construction of the story; secondly, as a means of comedy, a mainstay in any Ozu film; and finally, as two themes that reappear in each of the characters: opportunity and fatalism.

I. Narrative Functions
In the opening scene, Hirayama is in his office. His friend Kawai visits him to talk about a marriage prospect for Hirayama’s daughter, Michiko. Hirayama is hesitant to marry off his daughter because he thinks she is too young. Michiko does not want to leave her family, as well. Kawai thinks otherwise, claiming that if Michiko doesn’t marry now, she’ll grow old and never have another opportunity at marriage. He spends much of the rest of the movie trying to convince Hirayama and his daughter to change their minds.

The question of whether or not this is a good chance (or the last one) for Michiko to marry forms the frame of the movie. Within this global frame of chance, there are many subplots also dealing with chance.

At a dinner one night, Kawai, Hirayama and their friend Horie discuss a chance meeting with their old professor on a train. As it turns out, Hirayama has been living near “the Gourd” (their old nickname for him) for many years, never running into him before. The friends plan a dinner with their professor, which introduces a parallel between Hirayama and the Gourd. The Gourd tells of his daughter, whom he allowed to stay with him after his wife died, instead of getting married. Now she is too old to marry, and both she and the Gourd are lonely, even though they live with each other. He was faced with the same dilemma that Hirayama is, and he chose not to separate himself from his daughter.

Hirayama also has a son, Koichi, who is introduced when he is given a great opportunity to purchase Macgregor golf clubs at a cheap price, which he still cannot afford. So, he goes to his father to borrow the money. Later in the film, when Koichi is bargaining with the middleman of the Macgregor deal, Miura, Michiko comes to pay a visit. After the deal is closed, Miura goes to leave, and Michiko follows. This is the first indication that Michiko has a romantic interest in anyone. The possibility of a marriage between Miura and Michiko comes to nothing because Miura already has a fiancée. This prospect, though, according to Kathe Geist, is a major foundation of the theme of the “missed opportunity (99)” which permeates the entire film, and will be explored in greater detail in the “Opportunity” segment of the paper.

II. Comedy
Another chance meeting is between Hirayama and an old war buddy, Sakamoto. They run into each other and go to a bar, getting extremely drunk and talking about the war. They discuss their own fate since the war, the hardships they endured, and what it would have been like had Japan had won. Sakamoto fantasizes of living in New York, with all the Americans wearing dark wigs and playing on traditional Japanese instruments. Hirayama, realizing the absurdity of such an image, comments: “It’s lucky then we lost.” Not only does he accept fate, but he seems glad of it, as well. Even though they suffered greatly because of the war, Hirayama believes their fate was the right one.

This scene serves little to further the plot: it is just a chance meeting with a character that never appears in the story again. The scene’s importance, though, resides in its subtler means: the ability to strengthen the motif of chance and fate, as well as provide comic relief. This combination of masquerading deeper character traits and the contemplation of fate through comedy is a commonplace in the film.
During dinners between the trio of friends, Hirayama, Kawai and Horie, combinations of fate and comedy appear constantly. While talking about the sad fate of The Gourd, Hirayama speaks up: “I lived by him all this time and I never knew.” Horie realizes that, “Such is the hand of fate, as in my own case,” referring to his marriage to a younger woman, two years older than his own daughter. This purpose of this juxtaposition is to link fatalism into the ‘lighthearted’ moments of the film, those where people are supposed to be laughing, leaving them vulnerable. Ozu uses this vulnerability to further implement chance and fate into yet another aspect of the film.

It is important to remember, though, that Ozu does not dwell on the ‘heaviness’ in these ‘lighthearted’ scenes. Above all else, these scenes of comedy are in the film as breathing room, much like Ozu’s own use of transition shots, and the pillow words in Haiku.

III. Opportunity
The basic outline of An Autumn Afternoon had been filmed over a decade earlier as Late Spring (1949). In both films, Ozu does not let the daughter marry whom she wants to. But the reason why they don’t marry is very different in both films, and this difference helps to clarify the individual themes of the films.

“Late Spring suggests that the heroine misses marrying the man she loves and she does so more because the two discover each other too late than because he was ready when she was not [as is the case in An Autumn Afternoon.] Thus “missed opportunity” is uniquely central in An Autumn Afternoon, and the baseball game is our first indication (Geist 91).”

The aforementioned baseball game comes at the beginning of the film. After Kawai discusses a marriage prospect for his daughter, Hirayama asks him if he is coming to dinner that night. Kawai responds that he has tickets to a baseball game that he wouldn’t pass up. The next shots are exteriors of the baseball stadium, complete with the sound of an announcer giving play-by-play commentary. Following these are shots of the game as shown on a television set, proceeded by three men at a bar watching the TV. A waitress walks by them carrying a tray. The camera follows her down a corridor and into a room where Hirayama, Horie and Kawai are seated. He did skip the game: he gave up the opportunity. Such a series of shots not only establishes a sense of temporality, but also their independent destinies: everything operates independently. After Horie skips out early on the dinner to go home with his new wife, Kawai’s bitterness comes out: “I gave up the night game to come here.” Horie’s shrug let him know that that’s the way things turn out sometimes.

A subtler example of missed opportunity is one that also draws binding ties between Michiko and her family. Hirayama comes home late: he has missed dinner. Michiko informs him that their maid has quit, and that the whole family will have to do more work around the house. Hirayama says he is leaving early tomorrow morning and doesn’t have the time; his youngest son says he is sleeping in, as well. Michiko is miffed, and orders the two men to do the dishes now. The next shot is of her doing the dishes.

This sequence develops a complex relationship of dependencies within the family. The men are dependent on Michiko to clean the house, the cook the food, and so forth. But, at the same time, Michiko is feigns a dependency on the men in her family in that she allows them to arrange a marriage for her.

The marriage proposal is one of many possible opportunities found in the everyday life of the characters in the film. Koichi has the prospect of golf clubs that he’s always wanted. And as Horie stresses to his older, widower friends: if you get the chance to marry a younger woman, take it.

IV. Fatalism
The combination of chance and fate can at times be contradictory. One of them offers choice, and the other a lack of choice. But both of these elements are apparent in An Autumn Afternoon. Ozu’s decision to this reflects the dual nature of the characters in the film: one that resists fate, as well as one that accepts it.

The majority of the resistance of fate comes from Kawai. He makes three standout statements on this subject. First is the threat that he constantly tells Hirayama: marry your daughter off or you’ll end up like lonely and unhappy like “the Gourd”. The second is a conversation he has with Michiko when he tries to convince her to take up his prospect: She says she can’t get married because her family needs her. He says to her, “You’d give up a good marriage?” She replies, “It can’t be helped.” His response: “Yes it can.” He believes that we have control over our actions, that we do have a choice.

The final statement is an empathetic piece of advice he tells Hirayama after his daughter gets married: “It’s still a shock.” He is talking about the shock that comes from your daughter getting married and leaving you. This is very ironic, seeing how he was pushing for this marriage from the start of the film. It’s also ironic in that even though he acknowledges that daughters have to leave, he still doesn’t accept it. Donald Richie says that irony in Ozu’s films “is there for but one purpose: our detachment reveals a design of which the characters are unaware, and this makes us want to move closer to these warm and very human people (Richie 50).” The design that arises from this irony is the sealant that binds chance and fate as one struggle for the characters of An Autumn Afternoon.

Fate isn’t always fought against, though. Many characters constantly refer to fate in trying to find some reasoning for either uncanny good or bad luck. Horie describes his marriage to a younger woman as, “the hand of fate.” Koichi, after finding out that not only does Miura already have a fiancée, but that he had asked to marry Michiko before and that Koichi had said no, also says “the hand of fate.” The Gourd even says that he is “accustomed” to the loneliness that is his life. These characters accept their life as it is.

Hirayama is aware that even though the Gourd didn’t marry off his daughter that he is lonely. He is also aware that if his daughter leaves he will be married. These opposing forces, the ones that Schrader called attention to, lead to a great contradiction in An Autumn Afternoon. Even though he does have two distinct choices to choose from, the ultimate consequence is the same: an inevitable loneliness. The ultimate coalition of chance and fate is not a cheerful one: the illusion of choice is overshadowed by an inescapable fate. This fate is the end of almost every Ozu film: a father sitting alone.

Richie’s notice of chance in another Ozu film is reflective of the conclusion of An Autumn Afternoon, one that is a summation of the pointlessness of chance. “In Early Summer a character observes that life is like a game of chance. ‘Happiness is only a hope - hope more like a dream, like hoping you are going to win at the racetrack.’ (Richie 67)”

Works Cited
An Autumn Afternoon. Dir. Yasujiro Ozu. Perf. Chisu Ryu. Videocassette. New Yorker Films, 2001.
Geist, Kathe. “Narrative Strategies in Ozu’s Late Films.” Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre, History. Ed. Arthur Nolletti and David Desser. Indiana University Press, 1992. 91-94.
Richie, Donald. Ozu . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film . Da Capo Press, 1988

Essay: Strangers on a Train

Strangers on a Train (1951)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

"As Funny As It Is Frightening"
by Cullen Gallagher

“When I’m in the swim, I want to be with the goldfish.” – Clara Bow in It

Hitchcock’s famous anecdote about the bomb under the table, and how to create suspense one must let the audience know that the bomb is there in lieu of it suddenly exploding (in fact, after you inform the audience, Hitchcock mused, you must not let the bomb go off at all) lends a great insight into the master’s assembly of humor, as well. By keeping the audience both in the swim and with the fishes, Alfred Hitchcock is able to make wildly perverse turns on the most fiendish of situations. The essence of his performance is that he is able to make the audience laugh at what’s not funny at all; rather, he challenges the notion of couth humor and reveals the darker, unaffected side of comedy that glazes even the most unpleasant of events.

Stalking, in suspense films, is the most normal of events. In some cases the character being stalked is aware of their stalker, and even acknowledges their presence. To the audience, such a scene has one emotional track: suspense: they are awaiting the capture, the acquisition of the subject of desire, for even murder is the climax of a particular desire. Hitchcock has included such a scene in his Strangers on a Train. Bruno visits Metcalf and waits outside of Miriam’s house, the should-be ex-wife of his crush, tennis star Guy Haines. Miriam exits with two escorts and they go to the fair. Expertly (or psychopathically?) Bruno follows and, at the precise moment when she is out of the sight of her escorts, strangles Miriam to death.

This scene, through Hitchcock’s lens, is as funny as it is frightening. Through the collision of characters and their backgrounds humor still pervades (the pay-off for an audience that pays attention!). In his American Cinema, Andrew Sarris argues that, “Hitchcock requires a situation of normality, however dull it may seem on the surface, to emphasize the evil abnormality that lurks beneath the surface.” Though he does persist that there are levels of humor to Hitchcock’s work, one that makes the audience “laugh nervously” and another that manifests as “a lively comedy of manners,” Sarris does not go far enough. He could have continued his argument by saying that Hitchcock requires a situation of evil abnormality to emphasize the ironic humor that lurks beneath the surface (Sarris 57-58).

Miriam’s character culls several layers of deception, each one more childish and immature than the previous. When she exits her house to catch the bus, the sudden appearance of two escorts is unexpected. That both she and them look like teenagers is the first removal of her dignity. The next removal occurs when her suitors celebrate how much she eats: unbeknownst to them, she is pregnant (and with another man’s baby)! She turns and looks past the camera, licking her ice-cream cone (like so many Lolita images, the union of the innocent and the sexual). Her gaze meets up with Bruno, who has been staring at her for a long time now. Their sights now locked, their furtive glances now acknowledged, their attraction mutual. Just as joined now are the sexual and the murderous.

Like Miriam, Bruno is also disrobed of dignity. He comes across a little brat walking with a balloon and pops it with his cigarette. Such an action reeks of immaturity, but in a deeper sense, it identifies a childlike rationale with Bruno’s upcoming murder. Popping the balloon will have no long-term consequences; sure, the brat will cry, but balloon’s are a dime a dozen, and Bruno’s motivation is nothing more than a taunt or, if you will, teaching someone a lesson. There is no connection to the little boy, just as there is no connection to Miriam, which is how he justified the murder to Guy on the train. This moment is the reversal of the Hitchcock pattern I have been describing: beneath the comic exterior is the serious interior of a psychopath’s mind.

Over at the test of strength, Miriam’s suitors both fail, much like Penelope’s suitors all fail and are slain by Odysseus. Miriam eyes Bruno, who then decides to test himself, as well. Before he picks up the sledgehammer, he eyes his hands, marveling at his own strength. He looks over at Miriam and she glares provocatively back at him. The irony is that she is turned on by the hands that are soon to kill her! Bruno picks up the sledgehammer and hits it home: the bell rings, he wins the prize, and Miriam goes off into the tunnel of love with her suitors. Bruno, alone in his boat, follows.

The murder sequence is devoid of the humor that has marked the previous scenes; it is shown through the lens of Miriam’s glasses that have fallen on the grass, and the image is as distorted and perverted as the people in the reflection. They appear in silhouette, as if they have been stripped of the pretty boy and girl images they purported as their ultimate desires are met: his sadism and her masochism. Were the nature of her murder not so fascinating and complex it could seem moralistic, but Hitchcock is not interested in preaching; as much as morals and ethics interest him, it is never didacticism that interests him: it is the exhumation of our fascination with the unmoral and the unethical.




Works Cited
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1968.

Cineholla pt.2

Lou's site is up - http://thearchempiricist.blogspot.com/ so hit it up! Keep posted for a collaboration between Jeff, Lou and I (and others yet unknown!) in the near future...

Cineholla

Just a head's up - I put a link to Jeff Smadbeck's "Sklog Blog" over in the links corner...check out his cinema blog, and be sure to give him a cineholla. And look forward to the LT Smadbeck's blog in the next few days...