The Crime of Monsieur Lange

Seen as social polemic or allegory, The Crime of Monsieur Lange is flat and obvious. The central drama is book-ended in such a way that the film takes the shape of a court case, with the theater-audience playing jury to the titular criminal, listening to the narrative outlined by the hero’s lover/lawyer, who chronicles the events that led to the murder with ostensible impartiality. She claims to only reveal the cold facts, while her listeners – a group patrons at an inn – examine the tale and subsequently decide whether to call the police on Monsieur Lange or allow for his escape. This happens at the beginning, which means the brunt of the plot is shown as one long spoken reminisce. Because we receive the narrative in such a manner, we are equal to the inn’s patrons, overhearing the story of woe and death in order to finally judge the killer. Predictably – given Renoir’s contemporary leftist dalliances, as well as the participation of October Group figurehead Jacques Prevert – the story of woe and death ends up fitting into the archetypal mold of ‘little worker exploited by big boss,’ complete with the rise of a cooperative and the downfall of a greedy ruler and his stringently hierarchical system. All well and good, nothing to see here, right?

Well, no, that would be wrong. This is actually a beautiful film, consistently delectable. The basic narrative structure, as written above, does cheapen the film somewhat, reducing its beauty to a couple of basic themes and ideas, but the beauty is still there and it is the beauty of all Renoir: movement and mannerisms, characters interacting in rich ways across the frame, the camera flying around (there are two shots in particular that are acrobatic acts of hold-your-breath wonderment, as the camera peeks into windows, rising and falling to catch action on both the first and second floors of the publishing house – each one of these shots is almost a world onto itself, a dance of bodies, a catalog of complex rhythms), a universe that is always active and dynamic, with the camera trying to keep up, trying to capture the greatest amount of detail. It helps that the film mostly concentrates on just one location: our immersion into the celluloid is aided by the camera’s willingness to spend so much time exploring the publishing house and environs. Also gratifying is the frankness with which the film tackles stuff like dead newborns, premarital relationships, and sexual harassment. There is no sensationalizing and, in fact, characters often react in unnervingly cavalier fashion to developments that even most modern films would treat with serious-faced gravitas. In one scene, a young man discovers that his sweet darling is pregnant from big boss, who more or less raped her a few scenes prior. What does the young man do? He laughs! Why? Because big boss recently died, or so he thinks, and her being pregnant from a dead guy is apparently hilarious. He loves her and that’s all that really matters. There’s very little dwelling on propriety, since these humble characters have no use for it. What matters is what they can do to help themselves and live happily, not what morality might dictate about their personal worth. When an older man suggests that the sweet darling is a slut – though not in so many words – the protagonists reprimand the dull fogie accordingly.

There is something else that’s relevant about this frankness and that is that it allows Renoir’s acting style to flourish. His technique is to have very expressive characters, whose hands and faces are free to gesticulate around and imply myriads of feelings. There is no place, then, for emotional rigidity and conservative moralizing. It is much more important for every individual to constantly reinforce his or her own uniqueness through physical communication. Every person is someone to investigate and observe, someone to interact with, someone with whom to travel the suggestive itineraries scribbled on the air by their swaying bodies. Their freedom is ours, too.

About Monsieur Lange: He’s an idealistic writer of pulp westerns stuck in a cynical milieu, a predecessor to both Holly Martins in The Third Man (minus the ‘foreigness’ that is so central to Carol Reed’s fish-out-of-water scenario) and Andre Jurieux in The Rules of the Game: a naive, adventurous male who suffers a tragic fate and who, despite having the film’s plot revolve around him, is very much led into a pit by surrounding forces. This might seem incongruous with Monsieur Lange. The murder is his decision. He is not technically coerced into it, even if there are contextual pressures. Yet, one gets the impression that Lange is unaware of the potential consequences of his deed. He is introduced as an oblivious boy with his head in the fictional clouds of his wild imaginings. Considering the socialist themes purveyed by the aforementioned narrative structure, Lange occupies the role of leftist hero, killing big boss to keep the proletariat dream alive. But he is a strange leftist hero: utterly uninterested in reality (his vision of Old West America is constructed with minimum historical research and maximum childlike fantasy) and decidedly unenthusiastic about his newfound turn as socialist soldier. His reaction after big boss’s demise is a dazed and curt “so easy” – not words befitting of a hero, but of an uncertain and simple boy who was not ready to kill, who is amazed that he has killed, and who barely understands how the violent event came and went before he could realize what it meant. He is not a fighter for social justice, except unwittingly. He is a writer who is merely happy that he can regularly unveil his fiction for the jubilation of children – for he is also a child, if an over-grown one.

Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water

Shyamalan casts himself as a literary messiah whose work will change the world. Meanwhile, a film critic gives advice to the main character by referencing movie cliches. The advice ends up nearly ruining the main character’s hopes of saving a really pretty sea nymph. As the main character basically says: “What do the critics know?!” It’s a bit much to take. We could ignore the issue if the film were not so dependent on its meta-narrative gamesmanship, but if we take away the meta-narrative, we’re left with a not-very-exciting fairy tale about a little kid who saves a spiritual creature by reading hidden messages on cereal boxes. And this happens after a failed attempt by his dad to read hidden messages in crossword puzzles. The only way for all this silliness to work is if we view the film as it was likely intended to be viewed: a whimsical fiction about common people finding transcendence through storytelling. Evidence to support such a reading abounds. The pretty sea nymph is called Story. A philosopher wants to believe in fiction in order to escape his dreary life. An annoying Korean woman helps the main character by recalling old legends. A varied assortment of apartment-complex inhabitants readily accept the wild fantasy presented to them regarding the sea nymph and her precarious fate. The sea nymph looks appropriately alien, I suppose, and for some reason, the camera is obsessed with her legs. I admit, they are great legs, but the obsession borders on creepy fetish. It’s fine at first, when our main character first meets the sea nymph and struggles with the resulting sexual tension: not being human, she does not understand human sex drives and finds nothing noteworthy about presenting herself naked to a lonely middle-aged man. Later on, however, when she is battling for her life, predicting the future, and generally behaving magically, she continues showing off her legs, or rather, the camera keeps staring at them. There is even an erotically charged pan that has nothing to do with the mood that is supposed to be operating at the time.

That aside, what we have is a story about the power of stories to enrich our daily boredom. All of the action is set in an apartment-complex ostentatiously called The Cove, even though there are no coves to be found and the locale is the opposite of exotic: it is drab, dull, and unremarkable. Christopher Doyle adds some fanciness with chiaroscuro lighting and a couple of bravura shots, including an underwater final shot that parallels the viewpoint of the titular Lady, although she is not underwater at that particular junction. Nevertheless, Doyle cannot conceal the ordinariness of the apartment-complex, nor is he supposed to. The Cove is what the characters have to escape through imagination. Seen like this, the film becomes charming, despite the unnecessarily highlighted eccentricities of certain characters (an uber-depressed philosopher, a couple of uppity Asians, a bodybuilder who concentrates only on one side of his body, etc). We can say that the eccentricities work as slight self-parody: they are fictional characters made all the more “fake” thanks to their eccentricities. These characters encounter fiction, communicate fiction, and are fiction themselves, absolutely blatant fiction. Of course, any potential self-parodic strain has to somehow mingle with Shyamalan’s appearance as the messianic writer, unless we also consider this messianic turn to be parody, a position I find little evidence to validate. In fact, the whole thing is probably in earnest. Shyamalan is the artist-creator inspired by legend, fiction, and magic. The director-playing-writer finds his muse in the sea nymph. Following their first encounter, the former goes on to finish his masterpiece, the one that will immortalize him even as it will kill him. If we want to take this as far as conceptually possible, Shyamalan is claiming that he shall willfully die for his art. He also wants to kill his critics. The film critic, whose words are almost responsible for the sea nymph’s death, gets eaten alive while spouting typical critic-speak about what should happen in a movie and, thus, to himself. If we remember that the sea nymph serves as inspiration for the artist-creator, then Shyamalan wants the critics to die for almost killing his mojo.

Lady in the Water is Shyamalan in near-confessional mode, dramatizing his relationship to the storytelling that dominates his mind. Like Sabato in Abaddon, el exterminador, the author walks inside his own work and dabbles with his own creations. Unfortunately for Shyamalan, he’s not a very intriguing confessor. His film has few visual wonders and a sloppy sense of rhythm. His existence within the text also fails to yield the kind of intimate, beautiful, tortuous results that Sabato grabs from his own experiment. We have little to discover besides a source for the artist-creator’s inspiration. Shyamalan points at his muse and subsequently considers his probing finished. Even his portrayal of common people interacting with storytelling is hollow. The ultimate transcendence has little joy to it. Compare it to Celine and Julie altering their Soap Opera. With Lady in the Water, the transcendence of storytelling is conflated with the excitement of popcorn flicks. All that monster-movie suspense partly conceals the basic narrative about people finding meaning and purpose through fiction. Rivette constantly foregrounds the meta-narrative through composition and staging reminiscent of the television dreck that the heroines are so intent on upsetting. Shyamalan certainly works out the meta-narrative in his script, but his filming mostly consists of conventional thriller-tactics. The meta-narrative is always both there and not there. The characters are supposedly interacting with fiction, but at times it’s as if they were not aware of their interaction. I believe that’s where the film breaks: the constant transitions from earnest drama, to ridiculous humor, to satire, back to earnest drama, and finally to run-and-gun suspense, means that we never settle on any specific tone or mood, which is not bad in and of itself, but here it’s just scattershot nothingness, resulting in the meta-narrative hiding behind the mess. Lady in the Water has an adventurous soul. It wants to be an ode to yarn-spinning, and it is, warts and all, but its bi-polar personality undermines its intentions.

Two Films: Ruiz’s On Top of the Whale and Norstein’s Tale of Tales

I saw two films today, something I never do because I prefer to be patient with my viewings, allowing each film to own a portion of my week, maybe a day or two, perhaps even more, and, although I may continue to think about a film after I interrupt its rule over my consciousness by watching another film, I still like to bestow upon films some kind of exclusive period. Today, however, I watched two films: Raul Ruiz’s On Top of the Whale and Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales. There was little chance of this dynamic duo disappointing me. Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog is one of my favorite films and Raul Ruiz becomes better and better the more I am exposed to his work. I first encountered the latter director through a screening of Time Regained at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Film, commonly known as BAFICI. That film was impressive enough: a whole era, a vanishing class, a cast of characters roaming through a subjective memory, a dying writer whose brain hosts the only space wherein these characters can still exist, destroyed as they have been by time and other unfortunate processes. There was a lot of visual wonder on display, obviously: a Ruiz trademark, although he was helped along handsomely by cinematographer Ricardo Aronovich. They are a good fit for each other, which is why they’re currently inseparable: they have already done two films together and are preparing a third. Aronovich’s fluid camera, his mechanical gymnastics, are exactly what Ruiz’s layered visual narratives require. What Ruiz does is to make images exist on many different planes at once. For instance, the flashbacks that comprise most of Time Regained are simultaneously: an adaptation of the original Proustian text; a costume drama about early twentieth century aristocratic society; a distorted visualization of one man’s past; and an attempt by a dying man to understand his memories, to find connections, to envelop everything a distant era meant for him.

On Top of the Whale does not have Aronovich’s flying camera. It does, however, have Ruiz, so there’s still a lot of aesthetic beauty, albeit beauty that might be undermined by the film’s lack of availability and prospective viewers’ subsequent dependence on terrible prints. One problem with Ruiz – at least for newcomers – is that, like Sokurov, he embodies all the cliches of art-house cinema. If we were to create a checklist of feared traits, neither director would leave a single blank box: heady dialogue, a lack of conventional plotting, slow pace, visual eccentricities, emotionally distant characters, intellectual preoccupations, an occasional lack of polish, and plenty of thematic obscurity. Sokurov even flirts with self-parody at times. Ruiz is too humorous for that, even if his humor might fly away undetected by those whose patience has given out. A question frustrated viewers might ask is: “What does it all mean?” I never ask this question because it reeks of simplification. We risk leaving the film up there on the screen, a puzzle to be deciphered, a chessboard forever beyond us, to be manipulated, but never to be accepted into our imagination. I prefer to ask: “What does this film mean to me? What did I feel while watching it? Why did I feel that way?” That’s a more intimate line of questioning, closer to self-analysis.

It works wonders with Tale of Tales. Like Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, figuring out a specific meaning for each scene is difficult if not impossible and useless. Norstein, like Tarkovsky a few years before him, is delving into his own memories and displaying the results, a little like the writer in Time Regained. Thus, it could be said that the only one who truly understands Tale of Tales is Norstein. What keeps me from embracing this criticism is that, impermeability notwithstanding, I was constantly occupied with emotions and ideas throughout the film’s duration. Does it matter that I don’t understand every scene? Am I supposed to? I don’t think so. This film is going more for rhythms and moods, different drawing styles alternating between each other, each suggesting a different reality: there’s the parent storyline of the little wolf; there’s the poignant visual poem about the effects of wartime on civilians; there’s the aside to the apple-loving boy and his alcoholic father; and finally there’s that bit with minotaurs, jumping ropes, and harps. These sections weave together and combine. Memory and dreams emerge from the fantasy of the little wolf. We navigate each reality, notice melancholy patterns: departures, time lapses, destruction, burning, death, and other natural cycles. Free association takes us to random places, but there seems to be a structure, an emotional core. I have only seen Tale of Tales once. These kinds of films have a way of being new with every return. You find currents and threads that had been invisible during the introductory voyage.

On Top of the Whale likewise has different realities, but they happen simultaneously. For comparison’s sake, Ruiz’s own Life is a Dream is more in line with Tale of Tales: the protagonist returns to his past through cinema, and each new film he watches or recalls belongs to a different genre. We jump across the assortment of films, eventually falling into some bizarre afterlife. Ruiz suggests that our experiences and memories are not merely linked to the fiction we enjoy, but rather, fiction contains and conceals our memories, our passions, our doubts, our fears, as if we discarded our traumas into the celluloid. Tale of Tales does not suggest this so directly, but there are still transitions between varying aesthetic styles, each style containing the memory that the protagonist is trying to reach, explain, or share. Some segments appear remembered, others appeared imagined or dreamed, and even the memories appear twisted by dreams. There is the implication that many of these dreamed memories might be products of artistic endeavor, as indeed they are if we consider the film’s origins: we do have an artist mixing dreams with memory and artistic endeavor, and that artist is Norstein. To share one’s memory is also to share one’s perception of it. It’s a performance: the artist is playing the part of distorting brain, unable to display the memory without first sending it through a subjective grinder.

Going back to On Top of the Whale, the film exists both as the story it tells and the story it refers to. It parodies Hollywood movies about white first-world rich folk who visit exotic third-world locales and mingle with the curious locals. There is a fittingly overwrought Hollywood soundtrack, full of dramatic rises and self-important cues. There is also a running commentary on Argentine history: during the 1800’s, a fairly deliberate cleansing of indigenous people was carried forth in order to make way for incoming European immigrants. An obvious reference to this occurs when one character blabbers on about the “bloodshed.” Another, grander reference recurs throughout the film. Among the central figures of the plot – if we can call it plot – are the last two specimens of a near extinct Indian tribe.

There are mirrors everywhere, languages where words and metaphors contain or produce other words and metaphors, language that replicates itself, language that can be reduced to certain essentials, language that perishes, mirrors that give birth to new individuals, replication, multiplication, reduction, etc. There is uncomfortable humor. One character beats an Indian because Indians need physical stimulation to stay alive. The rest of his white cohorts look on with bemused whimsy. There is a child of uncertain sex. There are various spoken languages: this film is an aggressively polyglot affair. The Indians learn European language and culture. One of the more cultured white characters ends up a dullard. An anthropologist who wants to learn about the Indians spends most of his time debating different theories of language. He exits the film and when he comes back everything has changed. Meanwhile, objects are incessantly being unearthed around the house where the protagonists are resting. On Top of the Whale occupies a fantastical plane. It is a pastiche of other films, a dreamy philosophical conversation, and a humorous satire. What do we have, then? On Top of the Whale surreptitiously enters our dreams, using pieces that are decidedly recognizable (world history, cinema history, etc) and then shuffling their typical order. This is common with surrealism. The hope is that audiences will confront and experience the recognizable pieces anew.

Ruiz includes an awkward reading of the following passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo’s cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan’s mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.” Marco Polo, inspired by his recollections of Venice, crafts city after city for the edification of Kublai Khan, who crafts new cities based on those he is told about. One place, twisted by imagination, leads to dozens of new places, and these new places, dismantled and reworked by another imagination, lead to yet more places, and so on. As before, replication and multiplication, and not just that, but replication and multiplication based on previous storytelling. Marco’s fiction allows Khan to engage in further fiction, not unlike Ruiz’s usage of previous genres, legends, and historical events. Like the two famous figures, he dismantles the cities piece by piece. His reconstruction begets On Top of the Whale. This precedent invites us to similarly dismantle the film and come up with our own product. Since it is such a fragmented constellation of old movies, esoteric ideas, murky characters, murkier plot, inexact surfaces, ineffable interiors, strange dream sequences that might be real, odd realities that might be dreams, and pseudo-science-fiction that deliriously projects a lackadaisical Soviet future, we can deconstruct and reconstruct at will, shaping a new fiction inside our minds.

Gone Baby Gone

This film is more fulfilling as a sign of Ben Affleck’s promise, than as a good film in and of itself. It has a tendency to signal unlikeable characters by making them grotesquely unlikeable (and unhygienic), which is both effective as mood-setting and lazy as characterization. It also has a tendency to announce its ambiguity – the film is not ambiguous itself, but it has parts that are self-consciously ambiguous, such as the moral-conundrum presented at the end, where the audience could be forgiven for expecting Casey Affleck to turn towards the camera and ask: “And what do YOU think?” Similarly, the ambiguous characters are announced as such, although in many ways, they really are ambiguous and alive, so it is not so much of a problem. I am thinking, of course, of the characters played by Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman. Alas, even they are a bit schematic. The film makes clear that they “had good intentions, but did wrong.” It is almost as if the narrative were structured less as compelling drama and more as an instructional debate video intended to foment coffee-shop conversations. We have Ed Harris and Morgan Freeman explaining their reasons, and then Casey Affleck providing a counter-argument. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, ask yourselves: who does the right thing in the end?” Again, it somewhat works, and I enjoyed the film, but I have to wonder how well it succeeds beyond its posing-of-the-question. Luckily, the film does end on a wonderful coda that, at the very least, allows the aforementioned question to persist even after the film’s conclusion, preventing the audience from complacently accepting the protagonist’s choice as the correct one.

One point I do want to make: Michelle Monaghan’s role becomes more and more tangential as the film progresses. I wanted for her to have a more primary role, especially since, at the beginning, she appears as Casey Affleck’s partner in a missing-person-finding team, and thus, she seems to be his equal in relevance. Instead, she eventually becomes relegated to a side-show, until the end, when she descends further into a mouth-piece against which Casey can bounce off his opinions. There are reasons for this: from the start, Casey’s character is most involved with the case of the abducted child, while Michelle’s character is reluctant to begin the investigation. Her growing distance from the case also serves to emphasize her growing distance from Casey – the relationship thins, until it apparently withers with the final passages. Since Casey is the main player, her distance from him necessitates her distance from us, the audience. This is dramatically logical, but unsatisfying regardless. She turns into the stereotypical female character looking at the male’s tribulations from the sidelines.

Combined Sight and Sound Top 100 (or so)

I’m always looking for this list, so I will post it here as a personal short-hand. This list combines the Critic’s List and the Director’s List and is in order, from greatest amount of votes to fewer (if not fewest – the list is actually more extensive if we want to include those titles that have only garnered two votes)

Citizen Kane – Orson Welles
Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock
La Règle du Jeu – Jean Renoir
8 1/2 – Federico Fellini
The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola
2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kurbrick
Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu
The Godfather Part II – Francis Ford Coppola
Seven Samurai – Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon – Akira Kurosawa

Battleship Potemkin – Sergei Eisenstein
Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Sunrise – F.W. Murnau
The Searchers – John Ford
Lawrence of Arabia – David Lean
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Dreyer
Bicycle Thieves – Vittorio DeSica
La Dolce Vita – Federico Fellini
Touch of Evil – Orson Welles
L’Avventura – Michelangelo Antonioni

À Bout de Souffle – Jean-Luc Godard
Jules et Jim – Francois Truffaut
Dr. Strangelove – Stanley Kurbrick
Raging Bull – Martin Scorsese
L’Atalante – Jean Vigo
Sunset Boulevard – Billy Wilder
Psycho – Alfred Hitchcock
The General – Buster Keaton
Pather Panchali – Satyajit Ray
Some Like It Hot – Billy Wilder

Mirror – Andrei Tarkovsky
Fanny and Alexander – Ingmar Bergman
City Lights – Charles Chaplin
La Grande Illusion – Jean Renoir
Les Enfants du Paradis – Marcel Carné
Andrei Roublev – Andrei Tarkovsky
The Seventh Seal – Ingmar Bergman
The Apartment – Billy Wilder
Au Hasard Balthazar – Robert Bresson
Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese

Apocalypse Now – Francis Ford Coppola
Casablanca – Michael Curtiz
The Third Man – Carol Reed
Ugetsu Monogatari – Kenji Mizoguchi
Le Mépris – Jean-Luc Godard
Chinatown – Roman Polanski
Metropolis – Fritz Lang
Ivan the Terrible – Sergei Eisenstein
Intolerance – D.W. Griffith
M – Fritz Lang

Ordet – Carl Dreyer
Wild Strawberries – Ingmar Bergman
The 400 Blows – Francois Truffaut Modern Times – Charles Chaplin
The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums – Kenji Mizoguchi
On the Waterfront – Elia Kazan
La Strada – Federico Fellini
North by Northwest – Alfred Hitchcock
Persona – Ingmar Bergman
The Conformist – Bernardo Bertolucci

Amarcord – Federico Fellini
Barry Lyndon – Stanley Kubrick
Greed – Eric von Stroheim
Napoléon – Abel Gance
The Gold Rush – Charles Chaplin
Man with a Movie Camera – Dziga Vertov
L’Age d’Or – Luis Buñuel
The Wizard of Oz – Victor Fleming
The Magnificent Ambersons – Orson Welles
Rear Window – Alfred Hitchcock

Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick
Pickpocket – Robert Bresson
Rio Bravo – Howard Hawks
Last Year at Marienbad – Alain Resnais
The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecorvo
Once Upon a Time in the West – Sergio Leone
The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah
Nashville – Robert Altman
Blade Runner – Ridley Scott
Pulp Fiction – Quentin Tarantino

Ikiru – Akira Kurosawa
Voyage to Italy – Roberto Rossellini
The Night of the Hunter – Charles Laughton
The Leopard – Luchino Visconti
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – John Ford
Viridiana – Luis Buñuel
Sansho Dayu – Kenji Mizoguchi
A Clockwork Orange – Stanley Kubrick
The Travelling Players – Theo Angelopoulos
Ran – Akira Kurosawa

Dekalog – Krzysztof Kieslowski
A City of Sadness – Hsiao-hsien Hou
GoodFellas – Martin Scorsese
Nosferatu – F.W. Murnau
Sherlock Jr. – Buster Keaton
Gone with the Wind – Victor Fleming
Stagecoach – John Ford
The Grapes of Wrath – John Ford
His Girl Friday – Howard Hawks
The Lady Eve – Preston Sturges

Double Indemnity – Billy Wilder
It’s a Wonderful Life – Frank Capra
A Matter of Life and Death – Powell, Pressburger
My Darling Clementine – John Ford
Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock
Black Narcissus – Michael Powell, Emric Pressburger
Letter from an Unknown Woman – Max Ophuls
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre -John Huston
El – Luis Buñuel

Madame de… – Max Ophuls
World of Apu – Satyajit Ray
Vivre sa Vie – Jean-Luc Godard
The Gospel According to St. Matthew – Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pierrot le Fou – Jean-Luc Godard
Chimes at Midnight – Orson Welles
2 or 3 Things I Know about Her – Jean-Luc Godard
McCabe & Mrs. Miller – Robert Altman
Don’t Look Now – Nicolas Roeg
L’Argent- Robert Bresson

Shoah – Claude Lanzmann
Once upon a Time in America – Sergio Leone
Blue Velvet – David Lynch
Three Colours: Blue – Krzysztof Kieslowski
Breaking the Waves – Lars von Trier

On Lengthy Films

There is an interesting passage regarding running time in Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History: or, The Wind in the Trees. It reads, “it is likely that Feuillade’s serials had an impact on Rivette’s ideas about duration. As Dominic Paini noted, Rivette and the other Cahiers critics would have seen Feuillade’s serials not at their local cinemas in weekly installments, as they were originally programmed, but rather many years later at the Cinematheque, and all at one go, over a six- or eight-hour period. ‘Rivette based his experiments with urban temporality on a Feuillade who in fact never existed, a museum Feuidalle,’ Paini wrote.” One of Rivette’s pointed sources of inspiration, then, was an unwitting inspirer. Rivette learned from a product that never intended to teach what it ultimately taught. Moreover, he was captivated, not only by the film, but by its unusual – and preposterously lengthy – screening. Running time, in this anecdote, emerges as a unique quality, and in fact, one of the most important. That is, it emerges as a reason to enjoy a film. It is not merely a technical fact or a hurdle to overcome. It is an element of our experience, a detail that can contribute to our immersion and connection. To put it simply, length can be a good.

What does it mean to sit and watch a film for more than three hours? What happens inside of us when the typical narrative rhythm is torn apart by a pace or structure we are unprepared for? We are accustomed to a certain progression of events, a certain speed by which the plot-landmarks are reached one-by-one. We can sense when the exposition begins and ends, when the characters are developed, when the conflict rises, when the climax nears, and how long the denouement is supposed to last. We prepare ourselves for this progression, this speed. We sit and watch, and in our minds we keep track of the expected architecture of the coming film. Once the three hour mark is passed by, our preconceptions start to whither. And if the film, in addition to never ending, is unconventionally designed – maybe it is episodic, maybe it wanders, maybe there is no rising action, maybe there is no real plot – then our preconceptions are completely disposed of.

Why do these preconceptions matter? Essentially, we feel safe inside of them, we feel safe within the expected architecture. We know the surface already, we know where the rooms are, where the pillars rest, and where the bathroom awaits. We feel confident in our ability to maneuver the lay-out. When a film does not work alongside the dictums of the expected architecture, we are helpless. Our inability to predict what is to come (not in terms of plot, so much as in terms of rhythm – not what happens, so much as when it happens) makes us nervous. It is also liberating. Safety is comforting, just as it can also be boring. The adventurous viewer knows the pleasure of the unknown and a long film promises a move away from the common lay-out, a move that implies either a new lay-out we have never encountered before or no discernible lay-out at all. Either way, the fact that we no longer tread familiar ground means that we are invariably more alert, less complacent, imbued with a greater willingness to explore, since there is, of course, much to explore: this is unfamiliar ground, an unknown lay-out, and the only way to get our bearings is to survey the area closely.

Colors

At what point do we have to raise our arms and scream, “Well, that’s a perfectly stupid reason to like a movie,” consequently ignoring our positive reaction as utter silliness? Is there such a point? Does it matter? Is there a “right” way of enjoying something? Where is the limit? Because at some point, it does become odd to praise a film because, say, a background is fun, or the sky shines forth with a particular hue, or the doves cocoo endearingly. Yet, despite the oddness, if a film has gone to a great deal of trouble, as is the case with The Adventures of Robin Hood, to charge at us with a candy-colored universe of inconsolably unrealistic and deliriously enjoyable costumes and sets, then is it not sensible to praise the film for the fruit of its efforts? Well, I maintain that it is! And, at any rate, any reason for enjoying a film, in as so far as it is a reason, and that reasons are often interesting in and of themselves regardless of how logical they might or might not be, any reason for enjoying a film is worth appraising.

So, The Adventures of Robin Hood is in many ways a bad and decidedly dated movie. However, and get this, it becomes good because it is dated, so that maybe, it is better now than it was then. I know, it sounds crazy. How can it be better now than it was then when it was more popular then than it is now? Perhaps, because our modern viewpoint of the film enriches it with meanings it never had. Consider the opening paragraph of Roger Ebert’s write-up of this film for his Great Movies Archive, and in particular, consider this passage: “In these cynical days when swashbucklers cannot be presented without an ironic subtext, this great 1938 film exists in an eternal summer of bravery and romance.” The appeal of the movie, then, is that it is a fly stuck in amber, a really well-preserved mummy that has lingered in an icy respite for hundreds of years, thus maintaining its physical shape. The Adventures of Robin Hood exemplifies a moment in time and that moment’s movie-making philosophy, and it is that containment of a moment that makes it special. When it was released, it didn’t have this added quality, because it was not yet history. It was just a film. Now, it is a film and a document. It has become fascinating, a relic. They simply “don’t make them like that anymore.”

Of course, there’s some good reasons behind why they “don’t make them like that anymore.” If released today, some of the prevailing characteristics of the film would be savaged by critical minds. Would anyone really accept the paper-thin villains? Would anyone really stand for Robin Hood’s shockingly forced laugh? What about Lady Mariam’s incredibly rapid acquisition of social consciousness? Or the “innocent” comedy which is also dumb comedy? Or the fact that they handle ostensibly weighty swords as if they were rapiers? Or, and this is crucial for what is to follow, the everlastingly beautiful outfits? Dirt does not exist in The Adventures of Robin Hood. In this magical universe, you can wander all over the forest without worrying about splinters, mud, and other unfortunates. All clothes have been perpetually dry-cleaned, not yesterday, but five minutes ago. Now, here’s the rub: we would lambaste a modern film for this absence of real-world grit, and yet, if The Adventures of Robin Hood had real-world grit, it would not be very entertaining and all, and in fact, it would lose its main attraction, which is, if the title of this note is not clear enough, colors! They “don’t make them like that anymore” because nowadays you can’t do an historical epic without conceding that climbing a tree and subsequently dropping down twenty meters below to scuffle with a soldier will probably ruin your uniform. Back in “those days,” though, you could pretend that, indeed, costumes are always perfect no matter what you do, and if that is not the case in the real-world, well then, guess what, it’s better-looking this way and, anyhow, this is a movie, not the real-world.

Thus, The Adventures of Robin Hood provides pleasures that are no longer available. It allows itself to offer psychological motivations on the level of kindergarten morality handbooks – stealing is bad, give to the poor, the poor are poor – and instead focus on all those more important things like gowns, banners, tights, headdresses, well-cooked dead animals, and Olivia de Havilland. What makes this fact special is how completely movie-ish it all is: you can really only get this at the cinema. The parade of colors takes precedence over a story that is not very intriguing anyway because we’ve heard it a million times before, and this parade of colors is the stuff of film, absolute and practically independent visual pleasure. Nothing is really that colorful, but the Technicolor process makes it so. You can forget the dialogue – although, admittedly, this is a strong point, being that the film has some darn good lines – and focus on the variety of fabrics that change as often as the setting. Let’s go back to Olivia de Havilland. Every time she appears, she has something new on, and everything she wears is imbued with absolutely sublime fashion sense. You get lost on the abstract shapes embroidering her small and wonderful body. What, there’s plot going on? Who cares, look at that cut, those greens, reds, and blues! At one point, Lady Mariam is captured and held in a cell. For the first time in the movie a new scene, logically enough, does not result in a new dress, since she can’t change inside the cell, it being a cell. It’s shocking. The horror! What are they doing to Lady Mariam? Do anything to her, fail to feed her, cut her head off, but depriving her of trying on a new dress, why, that’s just cruel! You see, watching The Adventures of Robin Hood means to worry about issues that are typically negligible. A different sort of storytelling emerges, one based on visual patters and rhythms that we recognize throughout the running time, patterns and rhythms that have little to do with the story or the themes. It’s practically avant-garde, not because the film is avant-garde, but because our interaction with the film takes a turn for the plastic – it’s all about the fluctuating surfaces and how they make us feel. Why, that’s marvelous, absolutely marvelous.

Favorite ‘Seventy Five’

Always changing, these are the standings as of this date:

(1) The Rules of the Game
(2) Eight and a Half
(3) The Conformist
(4) The Passion of Joan of Arc
(5) Blade Runner
(6) La Dolce Vita
(7) Alphaville
(8) Throne of Blood
(9) Stalker
(10) Celine and Julie Go Boating
(11) Syndromes and a Century
(12) Ashes and Diamonds
(13) Citizen Kane
(14) L’Avventura
(15) The Third Man
(16) L’Eclisse
(17) Outer Space
(18) 2001: A Space Odyssey
(19) Still Life
(20) Tokyo Story
(21) Apocalypse Now
(22) Wings of Desire
(23) Umberto D
(24) Princess Mononoke
(25) The Spirit of the Beehive
(26) George Washington
(27) In the Mood for Love
(28) The Empire Strikes Back
(29) Landscape in the Mist
(30) Le Trou
(31) Suspiria
(32) Koyaanisqatsi
(33) Eaux D’Artifice
(34) Bicycle Thieves
(35) Aliens
(36) L’Argent
(37) Touch of Evil
(38) Fanny and Alexander
(39) The Battle of Algiers
(40) Jules and Jim
(41) L’Atalante
(42) Hedgehog in the Fog
(43) Satantango
(44) Persona
(45) Hiroshima, Mon Amour
(46) Punch-Drunk Love
(47) Vertigo
(48) La Cienaga
(49) Back to the Future
(50) Ikiru
(51) M
(52) Au Hasard Balthazar
(53) Grand Illusion
(54) My Life to Live
(55) Sunrise
(56) Blissfully Yours
(57) Time of the Wolf
(58) Los Olvidados
(59) Vive L’Amour
(60) The Decalogue
(61) Millenium Mambo
(62) The Naked Island
(63) Cinema Paradiso
(64) Army of Shadows
(65) Duck Soup
(66) Taxi Driver
(67) High and Low
(68) The Dreamers
(69) Eraserhead
(70) Spirited Away
(71) Cache
(72) Playtime
(73) Metropolis
(74) Dream Work
(75) The Tulse Luper Suitcases

Comedy? Argentine-Style?

I wonder how cultural identification works. By this I mean, what do we find funny? Why do we find it funny? How much does background play into our opinions? It’s all rather messy. I both enjoy and hate the comedic styles of my home country. On the former end of the spectrum, that is, on the enjoyable side of things, there is a penchant for honestly and for wonderful expressivity. On the latter end, however, there is also a penchant to let this expressivity get out of control. All sorts of annoying hand-movements and loud hollers may ensue, drowning out whatever humor the scene in question ever hoped to communicate.

Perhaps it’s a question of volume. Some comedies are more subdued, others are more extreme. It all depends on the comedians and on the directors. It also depends on the medium. Film comedies tend to lean towards the calm and measured while television comedies are stuck in a grotesque wasteland. I can barely watch them. This bleeds into dramatic genre-pieces as well. We note the same personality split, the same divergence between melodramatic grandiosity and quiet observation. In short, we get the sappy Luna de Avellaneda and the subtly tragic La Niña Santa. This division is somewhat true around the world, but it seems that in Argentina both styles are specific to the culture. Both feel very Argentine.

I don’t know where Taratuto’s Un Novio Para Mi Mujer stands. I think it’s a middle ground. It is occasionally overdone and mostly unhurried. Some scenes step over the line and other scenes hold back. The actors are allowed to work with their characters and give them movement and life. Yet, they sporadically dive into the arena of hyperbole and caricature. I think it is a case study. This movie hosts, within itself, the two pronged nature of Argentine comedy.